


A Winter's Tale

by Anjou



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Mytharc, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 18:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 64,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2865872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anjou/pseuds/Anjou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is late winter, dark and cold, the landscape obscured and transformed by snow and ice. One must step carefully, for the very ground can be treacherous. This is a lesson Mulder and Scully have already learned when the pristine snow in Antartica yielded a long-buried secret. But the winter can hold many secrets, and could tell many tales, if it so chose. </p><p>This is but one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first idea for an X-Files story that I ever had, and one that I believed had been lost forever. Years ago, the laptop where I had written the outline and some scenes was destroyed. However, early last summer I found a printed copy of what I'd written, misfiled with another story. The idea of the story began to work on my imagination, until I finally committed the time to writing it out. And so, here we are.
> 
> A Winter's Tale was originally posted as a serialized story over 25 days, beginning on December 22, 2007 and ending on January 15, 2008. Minor edits to the text have been throughout the body of the story; this is the final version. 
> 
> As always, thanks to my sister and editrix, Suzanne, for her support.

~*~

March 1999

It all started with a ditch. 

Of course, that wasn't the whole story. 

It had really started in the aftermath of that horrible day at the Gunmen's. She'd been so sure that she was right about Diana Fowley, and been angry for so long about the blind spot that Mulder seemed to have about that untrustworthy woman. 

Privately, she could grudgingly admit that she'd been jealous and hurt for weeks and that was why she'd asked the Gunmen to investigate for her. But even if she regretted how she'd gone about it, in the quiet days after when conversation between them had dwindled to the bare minimum, she couldn't regret that she had done it. Diana Fowley was up to her neck in this conspiracy, was a friend and a colleague to those people who had killed Melissa, and robbed Scully of both choice and autonomy. She might not have had the proof that she had always demanded of Mulder, but in this one case, Dana Scully knew with absolute and sure certainty that Diana Fowley had collaborated with the doctors who had experimented on her. 

Truthfully, she believed that Diana had ordered her mutilation, an intuition that she could never explain, much less prove, to Mulder. It was a truly feminine thing, how one woman knew when another woman hated her. Diana had tried to dismiss her, to diminish Special Agent Dana Scully, M.D., at every possible opportunity. 

Diana treated her like she didn't matter at all, like she was a gnat buzzing around, a disturbance in the air. That dismissiveness, the cool dispassion that Diana maintained at all costs around her, told Dana more than Diana had ever intended. Diana Fowley hated her, and she wanted Dana to feel more than discomfited, she wanted her to feel displaced, the way Diana must have felt when she came back to the X-Files, intending to step right back into the shoes that Dana now wore. Diana Fowley had been foolish enough to think that Dana Scully could be ignored into disappearing, that losing her job with the X-Files would mean the end of her partnership with Fox Mulder. But six years of the X-Files had taught her what it meant to be ridiculed and scorned by peers, superiors, the world at large, and even, on occasion, her own family. She would not be so easily moved aside. 

Besides, Diana Fowley's big feet wouldn't fit into her shoes, even if she were inclined to step out of them, which she most certainly was not. 

Even now, after Diana Fowley had disappeared, leaving a trail of mysteries behind her -- the charred bodies at the El Rico Air Force Base; a deserted apartment at the Watergate; and the pool of Jeffrey Spender's blood that she and Mulder had discovered when they'd reclaimed their basement office –- she cast a dark shadow over their funereally quiet office. The puzzling lack of Jeffrey Spender's body, in concert with his astonishing declarations in Kersh's office, compounded the macabre tone. It was as if the air between their two desks was filled with the haunting presence of its previous inhabitants, both mysteriously vanished without a trace. It made what already felt like less than a triumphal return seem downright ominous, a dark reminder of the price of failure. 

Still, she couldn't attribute the heavy quiet that reigned in their office to anything other than that day at the Gunmen's lair. They were supposed to be putting the Files back in order, meticulously going over all that had been done, or not done, in the months that Spender and Fowley had spent in their places. The work was frustrating and slow. Call logs didn't translate into case files, or even preliminary investigations. E-mail correspondence showed huge gaps, and IT was taking its sweet time in turning over the missing pieces. Realistically speaking, she knew that the X-Files had a lower priority than FOIA requests from outside the agency, but it was possible that the life of an Agent was at stake — although it was hard to imagine that Agent Spender had survived the injuries that had caused his massive blood loss. 

As for the missing Agent Fowley, Mulder had been unusually reticent about whatever he had discussed with his ex-partner in the hectic hours before the El Rico massacre, giving Skinner the bare minimum of answers to his questions. In light of their last discussion about that woman, she hadn't brought the subject up, but it lay between them all day, every day, as they worked at their desks in near silence. 

More times than she'd care to admit she'd caught Mulder staring at her. His focus was penetrating, but it was as if he wasn't seeing her. He was profiling her, and she hated it, hated how it made her feel like she was the body on the examining table, the victim at the crime scene. It made her want to scream at him, to stand up and shake him, to ask him how he dared to look at her that way, but they were barely speaking, and she couldn't risk total alienation from him. 

As it was, the fact that her phone never rang at night, that whole weekends of silence would go by without a plea for her to join him on a wild goose chase or to come into the office on a Saturday made her feel vaguely lightheaded and nauseated. This latest Monday, Mulder had been late to the office. When he'd arrived, he didn't offer an explanation as to where he'd been until almost ten o'clock in the morning, or why his knuckles were bruised and abraded. He'd just handed her a cup of coffee from her favorite little café, with a "Sorry I'm late, Scully." Before she could even formulate a question, he'd proposed an outrageous hypothesis about one of the more puzzling gaps in the Files. She'd let him divert her, relief flooding her at what seemed to be a return to something like status quo.

But the silence, and Mulder's periods of observation of her, continued.

Sometimes, she would notice the quiet and look up to see Mulder staring fixedly into space, his posture totally still, his eyes just slightly narrowed in concentration. To anyone else, he'd appear to be daydreaming, but she wasn't fooled into believing such a thing. Once, when she worked the courage up to ask him what he was thinking about, he'd tapped the File that lay open on his desk. Just recently, he'd answered her with the assertion that he was trying to fill the gaps in 'of Agents Spender and Fowley's shoddy work' and her surprise at hearing him use Diana's name in that context was sharp and relieving, dissipating some of the tension that filled their too-quiet office.

Still, her phone never rang at night. She'd sleep tensely, in the dark days of winter and cold, her body taut and waiting for the summons that she'd begun to doubt would ever come. 

~*~

After four days of intermittent silence, interspersed with minor shop talk and void of jokes, innuendo and any sort of personal remark, Mulder had startled her by making moves to leave immediately after 5:00 pm. 

"Leaving so soon?" she'd asked sarcastically, before she had a chance to check herself. She practically bit her tongue to keep from asking if he had a date.

"I've got an early game," Mulder said, rolling down his second sleeve and refastening the cuff. "Oh, and I won't be in tomorrow," he added, almost as if it were an afterthought. "I'm taking a personal day." He drew his suitcoat on with a shrug and grabbed his overcoat. "Have a good weekend, Scully." And then he was gone, the tail of his scarf hanging in the space he'd occupied next to the door just a second after the rest of him disappeared, and before the door banged closed. 

By the time she'd started from her chair to go after him, she'd already heard the slam of the stairwell door down the hall. He hadn't even waited to take the elevator in his all-out desire to get as far away from her as possible. 

She was shocked and angry, but mostly wounded to have her paranoid feelings validated. He didn't trust her anymore, and he was leaving her behind while he figured out … something. The holes in the Files weren't big enough to anchor a man as restless as Mulder to his desk, but something had kept him here for the past four weeks. Once that unwelcome thought had crossed her mind, it was hard to shake the idea that perhaps he'd gone back to his first, trusted partner for whatever case he was hiding from her. The very idea had made her rigid with indignation, but it firmed her spine. If it were true, then Fox Mulder was not the man that she'd believed him to be all these years. If it were true, Diana Fowley could fucking have him, and welcome to him. 

First things first, however. Mulder wasn't the only investigator in this partnership. Scully called her mechanic, knowing that Thursday was his night to be open late, and dropped her car off for a long overdue tune-up, arranging for one of his fleet of loaner cars to be hers for the interim period. When Mulder left his game at the Y, she followed him back to Hegal Place in a nondescript Volvo, her bright hair hidden under a rolled brim knit navy cap. She'd settled in with a book and a thermos of coffee, but he'd come out of his building just after 11:00, dressed in clothes that reminded her of a hallway outside her hospital room in Allentown. Traffic was lighter at this hour, so she had to exert more caution in following him, especially when he drove to a sparsely traveled former industrial area down by the river that had been more recently populated by sketchy after-hours clubs. Clusters of clubgoers stood outside in their fetishwear, smoking in the foggy darkness. She'd had to ditch the car and follow him on foot, but he'd outfoxed her and she'd lost him in the crowds. 

She'd woken early after an uneasy night's sleep and found herself utterly incapable of focusing during the long, dull, interminable Friday. When he hadn't called in by 3:00 in the afternoon, she'd taken a chance and called both his cell and home phones, but the calls went unanswered before rolling into voicemail. She hadn't left a message, but left the office early in a foul mood, determined to shake off the abysmal week and enjoy her weekend. She tried to nap, but her dreams were dark and full of phantoms, and nothing at the movies appealed. After doing grocery shopping, picking at her dinner and washing, drying and folding three scintillating loads of laundry, she'd broken down and driven over to the Gunmen's, despite the late hour and lack of invitation to find out what, exactly, he was up to, even though such a journey guaranteed that she'd have to admit that she didn't know where he was.

It wasn't until her question was met with Frohike's awkward silence, while Byers and Langly shifted around uncomfortably that she had felt the first cold thrill of true fear. The truth was that none of them had spoken to Mulder since the day after that awful day when they'd confronted him about Diana Fowley. 

According to Byers and Frohike, Mulder had come back and taken their findings, and then left 'after some heated discussion'. That had been the last time that they'd seen or heard from him. 

She must have looked particularly stricken when this fact was revealed, because Langly had almost stumbled over his feet in an effort to get to the computer and start checking possibilities for where Mulder might have gone when Frohike had announced that they would track him. Byers had gently assured her that Mulder would be fine, and she'd nodded, feeling numb and frozen. They began the process of searching through the lists of all-known aliases they had for Mulder, looking for credit card activity, phone records, anything. She watched them all as if from a great distance, and left hours later with no new information. She walked out into the darkest and coldest part of the winter night without even drawing her coat closed, feeling nothing but fear.

Whatever Mulder was doing, he was out there all alone -- and she'd driven him to it. 

~*~

When the phone finally rang on Saturday morning, she shot out of bed to answer it after a couple of hours of thin and unsatisfying sleep. It was the service desk at her mechanic's calling to let her know that her car was ready. She just managed to thank them civilly before she hung up, still trembling from the adrenaline surge. On the way back from the mechanic's shop, she called the Gunmen but found that they had nothing new to tell her, although Frohike hastily assured her not to be discouraged. Instead, she steeled her resolve and drove to Alexandria, driving around the block a couple of times to find a parking space. Mulder's car was nowhere to be seen, but that wasn't unusual, or unexpected. 

His apartment already had the undisturbed air of a rare books room at the library, although she had a fleeting moment of hope when her key still worked. It had to mean that something yet remained of the partnership that they'd once fought so hard for. The lone fish in the tank watched her balefully as she silently assessed Mulder's few rooms, looking for clues. The small kitchen, with its half a pot of ancient coffee in the cold carafe, empty mug in the sink and ruffled pages of Tuesday's Post on the table opened to the filled out crossword told her nothing, other than the fact that Mulder had finished the puzzle, in ink. She passed into the unexplored territory of Mulder's bedroom, but it was harder for her to tell if anything was missing from it. His closet door had been left flung open, but despite the seeming invitation, his neatly hung suits accused her of treachery as she patted them down, finding nothing. His drawers, both literal and figurative, also refused to yield any secrets. 

Before she left, she wandered over to the fish tank and shook a few food flakes onto the surface. 

"What do you know?" she demanded of the fish, and watched with grim amusement while its mouth worked soundlessly, as if it indeed had secrets to tell. 

She sighed and turned to leave the too-quiet stillness of Mulder's apartment behind her, but found herself lingering on the threshold for one last look around. Her melancholy was deepening, and she tried to reason with herself to keep it at bay, but she was tired of only hearing her own voice in her head with its obnoxiously stifling pragmatism. Something was wrong, and she knew it without being told, without seeing proof. She straightened her shoulders and scanned the room one last time, eyes lingering on Mulder's couch, the site of so many of their late night conversations, trying to picture the both of them there, laughing and happy, only to feel the unwelcome sting of tears. She turned and walked out the door, and tried not to look back.

~*~

She was determined not to worry about what might possibly be occurring, and had convinced herself that she wasn't thinking about Mulder as she mechanically ate a small amount of Thai food taken out from a nearby restaurant. She watched the news, and something mindless and maudlin on Lifetime until she finally found an old noir film on the local PBS channel. Somehow, knowing that it would all end in bloodshed and sadness was soothing. She mused to herself idly as she flossed her teeth after the movie had ended that it was because the shape of the story was proscribed by its narrative form. That was an elegance that would not be accorded to her, still in the middle of her own formless tale. She smoothed lotion on her hands and feet and gave one last call to the Gunmen before she turned in for the night. As she expected, there was no news to be had, but the stifled hope lay thick in her chest. It didn't matter how rigidly guarded against such a possibility she held herself, because she felt it nonetheless.

She slid her feet between the cool sheets and picked up the copy of Possession that she'd been trying to read in fits and starts for years now. It was Mulder's, of course. A mystery set at Oxford, full of epic-length poetry –- how could it not be Mulder's? He'd been effusive in his praise of it for weeks, reading passages of it to her on planes as they traveled here and there. He'd even quoted bits and pieces of it from memory as they drove around those endless months of mind-numbing 'shit details' for Kersh, years later. He'd given her his copy long ago, and she'd always meant to read it. He wanted her to love it as he did, and had taken to tucking it into her suitcase when he'd come over to harass her while she was getting ready for their inevitable trips out of town. Fondling the worn spine of the large paperback now, she wasn't too surprised to feel her eyes filling up with tears. Mulder had been her friend, hadn't he -- the best friend she'd ever had.

The ringing phone startled her so much that she gasped and fumbled for it, already flipping the covers off and half-standing, sure that the Gunmen had found something after all. The sound of Mulder's monotone on the other end of the line pinned her to the ground and she stopped all forward motion, stunned into silence, as he said her name worriedly. 

"You busy, Scully?" he asked again, but there was a tension in his tone that warned her, and she turned the words over in her mind, hearing them echo for a moment.

"Just getting ready for bed, Mulder," she answered automatically, and then went cold with sweat remembering weeks of coaching in various rental cars, as Mulder had worked out the rudiments of the codes with her. Her heart, which had stopped the instant that she heard his voice on the phone, began to pound wildly at the implications of his seemingly casual statement. She'd answered him by rote, but that question … this was as big as she had feared all along. "What're you doing?" She remembered to add after long seconds of mental flailing.

"Watching the Knicks game," he said casually, but that edge was still in his voice, "I've got some old tapes that are awesome, and sometimes I can't resist taking them out for a spin."

Oh God. Her mouth went spitless with panic as he said the words that she'd feared. She sat down hard on the edge of the bed from where she'd been hovering and tried to choke out her next phrase, but it got caught.

Mulder sounded alarmed as he said her name. 

"Sorry, Mulder," she apologized, coughing and then taking drink of water, improvising. "I was taking my pill and I tried to talk at the same time."

Now it was Mulder who sounded a little choked, but he went back to the script and asked her what her plans were for Sunday. Behind his question, she could plainly hear the plea: would she come to him? 

"I've got brunch with Mom after Mass tomorrow and then I'm planning to go to the mall and return some things." She answered him using the code, and imagined that she could feel some of the tension leeching from him at the other end of the line. "Don't tell me there's a flukeman that needs our attention on my day off," she joked lamely, trying to keep the conversation light.

He laughed, and Scully felt herself relaxing, even as her fingers were still gripping the phone. "Aw, Scully," he teased, "don't lie to me. 'Returning some things' is the same as buying new stuff and even poor ol' Flukie would be no competition for a really good sale, am I right?"

"I'm just returning things," she insisted, "that shoe sale at Nordstrom's has nothing to do with it, really."

Mulder chuckled, but she could still sense the edge behind the banter, and she fought to regulate her breathing as she waited for him to reply.

"Scully," he answered her, "I really worry about your credit card debt."

Her scalp began to sweat. Whatever he'd done, it was huge.

"I suppose that means you don't want to go see The Return of the Swamp Thing at the revival house, then?"

"Do I ever, Mulder?" she asked him, hoping that the tremble in her voice wasn't as evident to those who might be listening as it was to her.

"Oh, well, Scully," Mulder said, "Can't blame a guy for trying. Get some sleep, partner."

The phone went dead in her hands and she just sat there and stared at it, trembling. Sleep was out of the question, but she laid down under the covers and turned the TV back on, hoping that the noise would drown out the sound of her tears as she cried a short, sharp burst of relief and terror into her pillow, waiting for it to be tomorrow.

~*~

The winter day was clear and bright. She found herself awake early, wandering around her apartment marking time until she could go to Mass. She knew that she was memorizing things, not just the mementos of her daily life for these past few years, but the way the light filled the space. Despite everything that had happened here, this apartment had been hers alone. She wondered if she would ever see it again. It was a strange and discomfiting thought, and one that she wasn't used to consciously contemplating, despite the fact that her job put her life on the line often enough. Hell, just a year before she'd been sure that she'd never return to these rooms from her hospital stay when the cancer was at its worst. Maybe she'd been too sick to feel nostalgic then, but she was now as she went from room to room looking at her possessions with a dispassionate eye. If she never came back, what would her apartment say about her to a stranger? Neat, clean, methodical, precise, feminine but not frilly – this had been the home she'd made for herself. Was she really going to leave it now?

Hand on the doorknob, she stood for a minute with head bowed and thought hard about what she was contemplating doing. Staring down at her feet, she thought about Melissa's blood, dried somewhere under the floorboards, of what was owed for what had been taken. She picked up the heavy Nordstrom's bag from the floor and slung her purse over her shoulder. Her overcoat was already on, the keys in her pocket. There was no choice.

The rest of the morning passed as if in a dream, complete with hyperreal colors and imagery. She wasn't sure that she had heard any of the Mass at all, as she was too consumed with praying for her family, for strength, for Mulder, for forgiveness for what she might yet do and for the fortitude to do what might be necessary. The candles seemed brighter, the songs more sweetly sung, all of it sharpened into significance as she got herself ready to do battle with evil.

At an early brunch with her mother, she compelled herself to stay in the present and to enjoy being there, and not to think about how it might be the last time they saw each other. It was hard to force more than a little food around the lump in her throat, but she thought of the long road ahead and tried to get something into her stomach. When she said goodbye to her mother, she made sure to hug her tightly, but not too tightly, and to tell her that she loved her. Her mother had been surprised by the sentiment, but not overly so. It was the kind of thing that Dana'd used to say more often, although she had probably been more likely to say it to her father than to her mother. Her mother told her that she loved her, kissed her with fondness and some exasperation, urged her to be careful at work, and then gotten into her car and driven away.

Scully numbly drove to the nearby mall as planned, not bothering to hide her route for anyone who might be following her. She parked in the structure at the opposite end of the mall from the Nordstrom's, entering the complex via The Gap. She bought a couple of utilitarian items – a ubiquitous white button down and a soft, long-sleeved t-shirt, and returned a sweatshirt from her bag of tricks. She took both bags with her into the bookstore and perused the new releases. On the rack set aside for the staff favorites someone named Rose had picked Possession as her choice and Scully smiled. Mulder's copy lay on the bottom of her Nordstrom's bag. She bought a couple of other books and went into Victoria's Secret for some new underwear, then browsed Williams Sonoma for a good long time, trying to bore any follower into utter submission. She bought nothing in the store, but amused herself by trying to stock her perfect kitchen -- never mind that her perfect kitchen would come complete with chef to prepare the meals for her, or that she'd have to win the lottery to stock it with items from Williams Sonoma.

She wandered across the mall to the food court and bought a cup of tea and settled down at the table with a copy of the latest Vanity Fair from the bookstore. She opened it, but spent as much time people watching as she did pretending to read the magazine. If she was being tailed, she was having a hard time spotting it. She hoped that they were waiting for her where she'd parked her car. 

Mulder had chosen this mall because security didn't actually tow the cars until at least a week after they'd been 'abandoned'. One test car that he or the Gunmen had ditched lingered almost two weeks before it was towed. She'd never bothered to ask where they got the cars from, as she was afraid that she wouldn't be pleased with the answer.

Nordstrom's beckoned from the other end of the mall and she made her way toward it, stopping in the Ann Taylor to return a sweater set that Tara had sent for her birthday. It was flowered and brightly colored beside, and although Scully loved Tara, she positively loathed it. On the way to register, she saw a simple sweater set in a warm blue that she was surprised to find herself drawn to. It was cashmere, and the amount it cost was staggering, but the exchange brought the price down to a manageable level. She didn't hesitate to buy it, wanting to indulge herself a bit. 

In a similar vein, she bought herself two pairs of shoes at Nordstrom's. One was a practical work pump, chunky yet chic. The other was more of a utility boot, low-heeled and sturdy. The boots looked warm, and fearing that she might need them in the near future, she snapped them up. She idled at the perfume and jewelry counters, watching out of the corner of her eye for any observer before she proceeded up to the next floor. The evening clothes at Nordstrom's were always beautiful, and she spent some time going through the racks before going to the more practical side of the floor where the upscale work clothes were. She tried on a couple of suits, and put one on hold, thoughtfully fingering the handsome jacket while the saleswoman wrote up her information. When the transaction was concluded, she thanked the saleswoman, walked toward the elevator bank and slipped into the nearby women's lounge. 

Less than ten minutes later, a bespectacled blonde woman with a ponytail came out of the bathroom wearing a long sweater coat and carrying an oversized handbag and a large Crate & Barrel bag. She walked briskly through the casual clothes, stopping to look through two racks, then went to the up escalator. She exited the store into the parking structure on the third floor and walked confidently to a Nissan Altima parked in the middle of a row, not too far from the store entrance. She bent down to adjust her knee-high boots near the driver's side wheel well, and then clicked the trunk open when she straightened up, depositing her shopping bag before getting into the car and driving out of the mall. While the clerk was toting up her unusually high parking fee, she casually put lipstick on, using the driver's side visor mirror to block a full view of her face as she did so. When her change was handed to her, she nodded to the cashier and simply drove out of the garage, heading west away from the mall. She made a series of looping right hand turns for a few miles before she got on the highway and headed south, back toward DC. A few miles outside of the city, she got off the highway and dropped a small padded envelope into a mailbox, then headed back to her car and drove west for several miles. When she was convinced that she wasn't being followed, she finally turned onto the northbound highway and began her journey.

~*~

Two hours north of Baltimore, Scully pulled into a rest stop. The wig was giving her a headache, so she put on a close-fitting knit cap and stowed her fake hair in her purse while she was still in the stall. She swapped the eyeglasses for large sunglasses and returned to the Altima after buying a cup of coffee from the vending machine. She had a long way to drive and couldn't afford to be picky about her sources of caffeine. She leaned over and opened the glove compartment, taking out the cellphone that was stowed there and turning it on. It still had battery power, but she looked for the cigarette lighter adapter that he'd left for it and plugged the phone in. Her FBI issued phone was under the seat in the passenger side of her car. She's dropped it down between the seat and the center console, with the phone still on, trying to make it look like it had accidentally fallen from her purse. She wondered where Mulder had ditched his phone.

A folded piece of paper in the envelope next to a map gave her the route he wanted her to take and she sighed, reading it over. Trust Mulder to make her go the most circuitous way ever to reach her destination. The rest of the envelope was filled with cash, and she blanched to see the thousands of dollars stashed there. The idea that Mulder had enough money to leave literal piles of it to be stolen out of a car that might have been towed made her head spin. He'd explained about his trusts and the money he'd inherited from his father on their long trip back from the Antarctic, but the fact that he was so cavalier about it was something that she'd never get used to. She tucked an assortment of bills into her empty wallet.

She studied the route carefully, realizing that he'd planned it out so that she'd go by at least one of their secret stashes. She pulled out of the rest stop and continued up the highway driving carefully, but not driving like a cop. She kept her speed low, trying not to draw attention to herself. The radio was set to an NPR station, and the Sunday afternoon show about how to clean winter debris from one's garden was soothing and not the least bit interesting, but it made her feel less alone. She'd rarely been on such a long drive by herself. After so many years spent traveling with Mulder, she felt the ache of his absence acutely, missed the factoids he would tell her about each town they were passing through, or ridiculous tales of X-Files they should have investigated but never had. The monotonous voice of the gardening expert on NPR was no substitute for the monotone that she missed.

She rubbed the back of her neck tiredly and shifted in her seat as the winter sun slipped closer and closer to the horizon. Would any of this matter? All of Mulder's grandiose cloak and dagger scenarios aside, tracking them wasn't about losing the microchips on their credit and debit cards or even in their phones. She could mail her wallet to the PO Box owned by George Hale in Washington, D.C. and leave her cell phone behind, but the implant in her neck was a whole other matter. Even as she drove to him, she was potentially compromising them both, and whatever he had done. She brooded and drove, her mind churning over these conundrums.

The hell of it was, whether it was by the Consortium's design, Mulder's will or her own desire, she was as compelled to go to him as surely as she'd been driven to Ruskin Dam last year. 

Fifty miles north and west of Philadelphia, she let herself into the self-storage place after minimal fumbling of keys and key cards. Early this morning, she'd chipped the caulking away from the soap dish in her tiny shower stall to reveal the bag that held these keys, carefully replacing the dish to hide the hole. The keys numbered more than a dozen; all storage units paid for by Mulder and spread out across the United States. She found the winter suitcase and changed into a more suitably Agent Scully-like outfit, then packed what she'd been wearing into it. She felt rumpled and unkempt. Aside from the fact that it had been in a storage bin for months, the suit that she was wearing was from her pre-cancer days and hung on her frame. She checked the envelope containing IDs that Mulder has left for her, and considered whether or not she should take a bag for him, but then let it go. Mulder could take care of himself. 

Outside, she hefted the bag into the trunk of the Altima, and smoothed her rumpled skirt, shivering in the chill as she exchanged the sweater coat for the winter coat that she balled up at the bottom of the Crate & Barrel bag. She'd reholstered her gun while she was in the storage unit. She might have left parts of Dana Scully behind her in DC, but she wasn't entirely foolhardy. The trunk now held a stash of ammo, and a couple of other small arms. She tucked an extra clip into her overcoat pocket as she hurried back to the car and its heater. It was full dark now, and although the mall back in Maryland wouldn't be closing for another few hours, she wanted to keep putting distance between it and any alarm that might be raised when she never returned to her car. 

She drove, winding back and forth along the same path, going farther north and west with every passing hour. When she stopped for gas along the route, she made sure to wear a hat with a brim when she went in to pay for her purchase. Her reading glasses and her retainer from her teenage years completed the look. If she was lucky, all the gas clerk would remember is that a woman with glasses and buck teeth came in to buy gas. She made a point of continuing to buy coffee, even as her bladder protested the constant assault of caffeinated liquids, and the frequent stops cost her time. It was better for her to be hyper and peeing than falling asleep behind the wheel.

The miles rolled away and the car began to smell like cheap coffee as the hour ticked past midnight. NPR had given way to late night talk shows, philosophical and religious meanderings and the ubiquitous Art Bell on AM radio. Without Mulder there to roll her eyes at, the show just depressed her and she changed the channel to a program on early music that threatened to send her to her permanent rest if she kept listening to it. At 3:00 am, she drove with the windows cracked and the heat in the car off, making herself sing all the songs from records that she had loved in her teen years. There was something poignant, or perhaps psychotic, about bellowing "Hotel California" as she dodged snowflakes 300 miles east of Pittsburgh. 

When she finally pulled into the parking lot of the motel that Mulder was holed up in west of Pittsburgh, she'd been driving for sixteen hours, and even with stops for coffee and to stretch her legs, she was stiff and beyond exhausted. Still, she was shocked to see Mulder awake, dressed in Agent Mulder garb and outside, pacing back and forth under the overhang of the corner room at the end of the motor court. His rumpled overcoat billowed around him as he came forward to greet her, and the grey winter light of early morning clearly showed how relieved he was to see her. 

"Hey Scully," he said, opening the door and sticking his head in as soon as she cracked it a sliver. He leaned in so close that she thought he was going to kiss her, but he continued bending down to pop the trunk latch on the floor. She told herself that she wasn't disappointed, and stepped out of the car and stretched as he grabbed all of her bags and dropped them over by the room door then came back, standing in front of her. 

"Listen," he said nervously, looking over his shoulder "I know you're tired, but there's something I need to tell you."

"Can you tell me inside?" she asked wearily, closing the car door and taking one step around him, toward the room. "The last time I stopped was a long time ago, and I really need to use the bathroom." 

"Scully," he said, as if he hadn't heard her plea, and his voice was so serious that she couldn't help but stop and frown at him in worry. 

He stepped in front of her again, blocking her view of the door, his eyes searching hers. Then, he reached out and touched her face. 

It was so unexpected after all of the weeks of silence and remove from him that she could not help the flinch that followed his action. Mulder's hand leapt away from her, and he took a long step back. Even though he had turned his head, she saw the hurt that flashed across his face and she sucked in her breath. She hadn't meant to do that. She began to step forward to apologize, extending one arm toward Mulder's back, desperate to do something to bridge the gap between them when she was startled by a small voice that said, "Mulder?"

She gasped, and heard Mulder do the same. At the now opened motel room door, a little girl with disheveled auburn hair rubbed her eyes and shivered in the morning cold, dressed only in a long white nightgown. "Are you leaving me?" she asked in a quavering voice.

Scully felt suddenly lightheaded and swayed like a romance novel heroine. Her foot, which she had lifted to step toward Mulder, dropped to the ground and she stumbled in shock, staring at the little girl whose white face was blurring into Emily's. Mulder put out his arm and caught her, breaking her forward momentum, and she grasped for him as she tried to catch her balance.

"Mulder?" she whispered, her voice tight with stress, gripping his bicep like a lifeline. 

When she'd grabbed him and held on, Mulder had pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her while she dizzily tried to make sense of what she was seeing, peering at the child over his sheltering arm. She could hear the fitful sound of her own breathing and knew that she was hyperventilating, but she couldn't stop. 

The little girl stared back at her, her blue eyes wide and terrified.

"Hannah, honey," Mulder said in a gentle voice that Scully recognized from far too many interrogations of child victims, "I'm not going anywhere. Go back inside where it's warm and we'll be right in."

She heard his words and the 'we' echoed and rolled around. The fatigue and the strain of the last few weeks, on top of the long, exhausting trip that she had just endured caught up to her and her head swam as his tone led her to the one conclusion she most feared. She struggled for another few seconds and then, for the second time in her life, Dana Scully fainted. 

~*~

She was only unconscious for a few seconds and when she began to rise through the strands of clinging grey fog, she could hear Mulder's voice, reassuring the child. "No, she's OK, honey, she's just really tired." She could feel his arms, one underneath her legs and the other around her back, as he carried her, then laid her down upon a soft surface. "Why don't you go into the bathroom and get her a glass of cold water?" Mulder suggested in his calm, kind voice and she tried to lift her hand, but it felt leaden. 

"Scully," he said to her quietly and urgently, "Scully, please wake up." He was chafing her hands and wrists like they did in Victorian novels and she was surprised to feel that it actually helped. 

She tried to say his name, but all that came out was, "Mmmm …"

He tilted her head up and trickled some cold water into her mouth and then laid her head back down. There was a pause and then she felt a spattering of cold drops on her face. "Mulder," she complained.

"Oh, thank God," he said. "I'm sorry, Scully. What should I do? Should I sit you up so that you can put your head between your knees?"

She shook her head and opened her eyes. "No, too much blood pressure change and I'll probably faint again," she murmured. 

"Eat this," Mulder ordered and handed her half a Twix bar. 

She opened her mouth to protest again, but Hannah was half-hiding behind Mulder, and the child still looked terrified at her dramatic entrance. 

"When was the last time you ate something, Scully?" Mulder demanded of her, and she looked up at him in exasperation. He was still wearing his overcoat, and by the creases in it, she assumed that he'd liberated it from one of their storage lockers. He looked tired, but he was wide awake with fear and worry, the energy practically snapping off of him. 

She started to say 'I'm fine', but stopped herself before she actually uttered it. Casual white lies between them had done nothing but create more problems over their years of partnership. "I've been too worried to eat," she said levelly.

Mulder looked startled, but dropped to his knees next to the bed. She thought that he might touch her again, and she tried to will herself not to flinch this time. "I'm sorry, Scully," he said sincerely, "I really am, and I can explain everything, but …" He stopped waving his hands around and ran them hard through his own hair.

Hannah. The little girl had moved away to the end of the bed and was staring at them with a very worried expression on her face. She looked to be about four, or maybe five years old, with a mop of auburn hair that spilled over her shoulders in loose curls. Her eyes were dark blue, much darker than Dana's own. She bore a resemblance to Emily, but was clearly not her clone. 

"Can I introduce you to someone?" Mulder asked, "Please?" He radiated anxiety and tension.

Scully stared at him and tried to get her voice to work, but nodded instead, eating a bit more of the candy bar. 

Mulder stood up, taking off his overcoat and spreading it over her before he turned and smiled at the child standing warily at the end of the bed, looking from him to Scully with measured curiousity.

"Hannah banana," Mulder said, and the child tucked her chin down and looked up at Mulder. He took a long step and then crouched down beside her in a catcher's pose. "Hannah banana," he said again, drawing her name out until she giggled. "Can I introduce you to someone?" He asked her formally. 

Hannah didn't answer, but stepped into the vee of Mulder's legs, leaning against him, peeking at Scully shyly from underneath her hair. 

Mulder gave her a squeeze. "Hannah, this is my friend Dana Scully."

Hannah just stared at Scully, but didn't say a word.

"Do you remember that I told you that my friend Dana might be shocked to see you?" he asked her.

Hannah nodded, her eyes never leaving Scully, "Because I look like her little girl who died," she whispered, as Scully's heart constricted.

"Yes," Mulder said and squeezed her fondly, "you do." 

"But…" Hannah whispered, turning her head into Mulder's shoulder, "she seems really mad at me." 

"Oh no," Mulder said, "she's not mad at you, Hannah." He tipped her face up so she could see him, and wrinkled his nose and made a funny face. "She's mad at me."

"Mulder," Scully protested in shock, sitting up as his rumpled overcoat slid into her lap. "I was just very surprised." 

Mulder jumped to her side as she swung her legs over the edge of the bed.

"I'm fine," she said to him, "Really." She drew in a deep breath. "Hello, Hannah," she said.

"Hello," Hannah said quietly, worrying the material of her nightgown over her belly. She stood half-hidden behind Mulder. 

"It's very nice to meet you," Scully said, feeling absurd, but extending her hand, as if this were normal, meeting what was most likely her daughter this way. 

Hannah stared at Scully's hand and then looked at Mulder, who had returned to his crouch at her side. He nodded at her. Hannah's ready acceptance of Mulder stung just a little bit more than Scully would have liked to admit, but Hannah stepped forward and put her hand into Scully's and shook it briefly, then stepped back and looked at Mulder again before she turned and said to Scully, "Are you my mother, too? 'Cause I don't have a real mom." 

Mulder answered before she could do more than gape at the child. "We don't know who your mom is, Hannah," Mulder said carefully, smoothing the hair back from the child's face. "But we're going to try and find out, OK?"

"OK," Hannah whispered, and peeked at Scully again, before she turned back and addressed Mulder. "I'd like to have a mom and dad," she said, and her sincere, innocent tone pierced Scully's heart. She couldn't quite stifle the gasp that followed Hannah's words, so she tried to cover by grabbing the glass of water and sipping it.

"I had a little chocolate stuck," she said weakly.

"You should put your arms up over your head," Hannah said seriously, "that's what Mulder told me to do when I ate the cake too fast and I choked." She continued on in a rush, not even waiting for Scully's response. "Have you had chocolate cake? I never had it before, but it was so good that I just wanted to eat all of it right away. I think I should have chocolate cake with every meal, for … " she searched for the word, turning to Mulder, "what was that word?"

"Dessert," Mulder said quietly. "Dessert is the sweet stuff that you get after you eat all your vegetables."

"You don't like broccoli very much," Hannah accused and Scully's eyebrow rose. 

"But, I ate it," Mulder said lightly, "and then I could have my dessert."

"It was sweet potato pie," Hannah told Scully, "I didn't like that at all. I'd rather have the chocolate cake."

"Oh," Scully said, nodding. "Have you eaten a lot of dessert with Mulder?"

"After every meal," Hannah said, "since he came and took me from the hospital."

Scully sucked in a sharp breath, but tried to keep her voice level. "Were you sick, Hannah?" 

"I don't know," she answered, reaching over Mulder's arm to pick up a striped tiger from the bed. Scully glanced at the bed and saw that the toy had several companions, all equally new-looking. "I lived there."

"Do you know what being sick means?" Scully asked Hannah, curiously.

"Mulder said it's when you don't feel good," Hannah said, "like being tired during the day, and needing to sleep all the time, or when your stomach hurts or your head does, but that didn't happen to me. Sometimes when they'd give me the shots it would hurt for a long time, and then sometimes they made me very sleepy but I don't think that's the same thing. Is it?" She asked Mulder. 

"I don't know, Hannah," Mulder said easily, making a stuffed rhinoceros lumber over to the child while she giggled. 

He seemed about to say something else when Hannah continued, "Are we going to have breakfast now, 'cause I'm hungry." 

Mulder looked at Scully appraisingly, and then said, "Maybe we should go out and buy some breakfast while Scully takes a nap." 

Hannah shrieked with joy and ran across the room.

"Mulder, no," she answered, still sitting on the bed's edge. "I just need to go to the bathroom and freshen up and I'll be fine."

Mulder looked dubious at this pronouncement. "We've got another long drive ahead of us, Scully," he said, "I think it would be better if you stretch out and get some real sleep before we have to get on the road. We can bring you something back."

Hannah was already busily digging into a new-looking "Blue's Clues" suitcase. The thought of going outside with the child seemed more exhausting than staying here and being left out of whatever was going on. She glanced at Mulder to find him studying her again, and she sighed. She wasn't going to get any answers out of him any time soon, anyway. 

"Coffee, Mulder," she ordered, "lots of it, and some bottled water." She walked to the bathroom door and closed it, resting her aching head against the cool wood. It wasn't thick enough to block out the small voice from the other room, the one that signaled that nothing was going to be the same. Again.

"And waffles!" Hannah exclaimed. "I like waffles!"

~*~

By the time Mulder and Hannah left the room, she was already close to sleeping, watching from under her eyelids. She supposed that she must have dozed during part of the time that she was watching them get ready, only half-remembering Mulder patiently negotiating with Hannah about appropriately warm clothing. And surely, she must have been dreaming Mulder awkwardly but gently brushing Hannah's hair while she chattered away, waving a hairband around in the air. 

But if she had been dreaming, it didn't explain why it was that Hannah was wearing that hairband, hours later, while she rode in the back seat of Mulder's rental as he led them to where they'd return her own rental. She had slept for a couple of hours, but instead of feeling refreshed, the sleep had left her muzzy-headed and lost, wondering if she was still dreaming, wondering when she'd wake up in her own bed in Georgetown, still waiting for the phone to ring. 

From one car length away, she caught sight of Mulder watching her in his rear view mirror while they waited for the light to signal all-clear for left hand turns. She supposed that she should smile reassuringly, or wave, or do something to acknowledge his concern, but she was too weary to do anything more than stare straight ahead. She could barely focus on anything more than just following Mulder's car mechanically, trying to puzzle out what in the name of hell was going on, where they were going, and to what purpose. It was all so exhausting that she couldn't even think about it, and found her mind occupied with mundanities instead.

For example, Mulder had put the hairband too far forward on Hannah's head, and he hadn't caught the hair underneath it on both sides, so only one side was turned back. As much as it bothered Scully to look at it, she had successfully resisted the urge to adjust it. She hadn't touched Hannah except for that once when she'd held her small hand for a few seconds, and even though her palms itched with the desire to fix her hair, or to adjust the waistband of Hannah's stretchy pants where it had rolled over upon itself, she hadn't done it. If she touched Hannah, she'd be confronted with the physical evidence, the bodily solidity, of what might actually be happening. For now, she was much more content with just letting that potential reality slide right on by her.

She wondered why it was that she never let herself think about the fact that there might be more of them, more children like Emily. It's not like she needed to be told that the potential for more existed, what with the harvesting of hundreds of her ova. But she also knew that she excelled at not thinking about things, purposefully avoiding that which was too painful or disturbing. She'd spent years pushing away the dim memories of her gruesomely distended belly, and other nightmare images. She'd convinced herself that they were the result of reading too many of Mulder's files, or Magic Bullet hypotheses seeping into her subconscious until a year ago, when Emily had appeared. Now that she's no longer sure that those images weren't just the result of fevered imaginings, she had no idea what it all meant. Did she bear something – not a baby, certainly – but something foreign and horrendous during the three months that she was gone? 

She turned the corner behind Mulder, watching the silent movie interplay between him and Hannah as they talked in the car ahead of her. Hannah had already picked up some of Mulder's mannerisms, her head and hand movement aping his as she spoke soundlessly. Whatever she said had made him laugh, and Scully watched his eyes crinkle warmly in the rear view mirror, only half-thinking about more things that she wanted to forget. She had been so bloated and heavy when she'd been returned from her abduction, and hormonally, she was a mess. She'd had her period for three weeks after being returned, which her gynecologist had attributed to the stress of what had happened to her. No thought was given to the fact that it might have been post-partum bleeding, as she hadn't been gone long enough to have given birth. Her rape kit had been negative, as well, which wasn't too surprising, as there was barely any physical evidence of what had been done to her, aside from the bloating, branched DNA and her never-ending period. 

Besides, it wasn't as if it hadn't happened before, which made it easier for her to write-off as a result of stress. Back when she'd been in med school, she'd once bled for an entire exam period, spotting every day after the heavier flow of her period had ended, ultimately bleeding for almost a month. Her then-gynecologist had believed that her body wasn't ramping up to produce enough FSH to start the ovulatory cycle over again, and had urged her to go on the pill to regulate herself. 

She'd stayed on the pill for years, until the chemotherapy had required her to come off of it. It's not like she was trying to prevent a pregnancy anyway, and if she survived the cancer, she was likely to be forced into perimenopause by the effects of the chemotherapy and radiation. At a certain point during her illness, she'd lost so much weight that her periods had stopped entirely. 

She'd spent considerable time wondering what to do about her hormones after she'd recovered from the cancer. She knew that having had cancer once, even if it had been provoked by the removal of her implant, adding extraneous hormones to the chemical mix of her body could have disastrous results, even if her cancer hadn't been hormonally based. But the idea of being menopausal at 34 was a little hard to accept. Then, of course, there was the implant, and its unknown effects upon her. She wondered now if its presence was responsible for her periods starting again after she'd regained most of the lost weight. Three months was all it took for her to cycle again, and this time, her previously erratic period was as regulated as it had been when she had been on the pill, starting precisely on a Wednesday, and ending the following Saturday. Her gynecologist had wanted her to have her blood drawn every few days for a menstrual cycle to chart her hormonal levels, but she'd demurred, saying that she wasn't expecting to start a family any time soon, and so didn't see the necessity. The truth was that she hadn't wanted to know what was going on. 

She pulled into the busy car rental lot at the small local airport in Columbus, OH and returned the car, waiting outside in the cold air for the shuttle to take her to the airport. Once there, she got off at the main terminal and walked in the door, only doubling back to meet Mulder and Hannah after she'd changed her coat and put on a wig in the bathroom. Her bag, which she'd been carrying by a long strap, was now wheeled behind her as she exited the terminal and walked in the direction of ground transportation. Mulder pulled up and popped the trunk, and she put her bag in it. He was wearing a short-brimmed all weather hat that was remarkably hideous, and large, concealing sunglasses. When she got in the car, Hannah was dozing in the backseat, her kingdom of stuffed animals spread out around her. She roused a little when Scully closed the door, but dropped back off to sleep before they exited the airport.

She raised an eyebrow at Mulder, surprised that Hannah was sleeping in the middle of the day, but Mulder just smiled.

"Car coma," he said quietly. "Didn't you used to pass out on long car rides?"

She smiled briefly, and buckled her seat belt. He knew very well that she often fell asleep in cars. It was one of his main excuses for doing the lion's share of the driving. "Where are we going, Mulder?"

"Near Rochester, Minnesota," he answered. 

She knew it was useless to press him for more information with Hannah in the car and likely to wake up, so she nodded and turned her head to look out the window at the grey landscape. The Mayo Clinic, she thought, and let the rushing images outside her window blur into nothingness. Despite the uncertainty facing her, knowing that Mulder was here with her allowed the tension to leave her body, and she let the world outside fade away, as the song of the wheels against the pavement lulled her to sleep. 

~*~

It was full dark by the time they got to the motel in Springfield, Illinois where they'd be bunking for the night. Mulder had grinned at her raised eyebrow and she rolled her eyes in answer. He'd been trying to get them to come to this town for years. Despite the number of Springfields throughout the United States, Mulder maintained that this small city was the home of the fictional Simpsons, a longtime favorite of his. "Land of Lincoln, Scully," Mulder said, getting out of the car. "It's educational." She yawned and stretched as she stepped out of the car, but otherwise ignored him.

The recipient of said educational benefits didn't seem in the least interested. "Are we finally there yet?" 

"Yes, we are," Mulder said, scooping her up out of her car seat. "Now, what do you say about going in and putting our stuff away, and then …" Mulder drew out his voice as Hannah pouted. He turned dramatically and pointed across the street to a small park with swing sets and other kid paraphernalia. "We go play for a while."

"Can we?" Hannah asked with shining eyes. 

Scully felt herself frowning, even though she recognized that Hannah had been cooped up in the car all day long. "Mulder," she warned, "it's awfully dark and cold."

"We won't stay out long," Mulder said, "just long enough to get some fresh air. Right, Hannah?"

Hannah had clambered down from Mulder's arms and was gathering all of her stuffed animals. "Right," she answered, then looked at Scully. "Please …" she pleaded, "I loved the swings when Mulder took me on them before." 

Scully felt her heart constrict at the idea that this child had never played outside until Mulder had stolen her from wherever he'd found her in the first place. "OK," she said softly, "but just for a little while."

"Yay!" Hannah said brightly, flinging her hippo in the air. Mulder laughed and caught it, then cheered with her, gathering all of their things and opening the door to the small, clean room in front of their car. 

Scully walked in behind them and looked at the two double beds and the ubiquitous pressboard bureau and TV stand, then closed the door to reveal a small café table that stood between two hard plastic chairs. She put her laptop from home on it carefully. The Gunmen had assured her that they'd made it impenetrable to malevolent sources, but it had been an act of faith for her to stow it in the bottom of her shopping bag. 

"Wear a hat," Scully instructed Hannah as she began pestering Mulder about going out again, before he'd done much more than heave their bags onto the luggage racks at the ends of the beds. 

"Oh," Hannah said, her face crumpling, "do I have to?"

"Yes," Mulder answered mildly, "remember what we talked about?"

Hannah pouted and dug into her suitcase, pulling out a knit cap with an orange pompom that clashed violently with her hair. 

Scully pursed her lips against the laugh that was struggling to come out. "We'll buy you a new hat tomorrow, Hannah," she promised, ignoring Mulder's offended 'hey' at Hannah's look of relief. "I'll let you help me pick it out, OK?" She had turned away to open up her suitcase, so she couldn't help the start of surprise when she felt Hannah press against her legs, briefly hugging her. "Oh," she said, reaching down to push Hannah's hair back with one hand awkwardly. "You should take your hairband off before you put the hat on," she said in a flustered tone, "it'll hurt if you don't."

"OK," Hannah said agreeably, handing the hairband to Scully. "Are you ready to go, Mulder?" she asked plaintively, jamming on her silly hat. 

Mulder cleared his throat before speaking, but his voice was thick with emotion. "Just let me take my tie off," he said. 

From the corner of her eye, Scully could see his discarded suitcoat laying on the open case at the foot of the other bed. She could feel his pointed regard of her, but she couldn't raise her eyes to his, no matter how hard she tried. Instead, she found her eyes fixated on the slim gold band on the third finger of his left hand. Her breath caught painfully at the sight and she felt herself flush, and turned away from Mulder to hide it.

She heard him cross the room to the door and tell Hannah to wait on the motel sidewalk for him. "Scully," he said quietly. He had a clear view of her now, and she wouldn't turn around again so as not to face him. She wasn't that much of a coward.

'I'm fine,' she wanted to say to him. 'I'm just fine.' The words, usually the first to come to the fore in speech for her, would not come. She raised her eyes to Mulder's, but dropped them almost immediately at the nakedness she saw in his glance. 

"Why don't you come with us?" he asked. "The fresh air might do you some good."

She opened her mouth, but her head was already shaking 'no'. "I'm going to take a bath," she said, but in her head she was pleading with him to understand as she raised her eyes to look at him again, afraid of the pity that she might see in his gaze. Mulder's expression was full of sorrow, but she could feel his compassion as he regarded her for the measure of a few heartbeats. 

"We won't be long," he said. "I'll take first watch." Part of her wanted to snap out of her stasis, to move her leaden limbs toward him and seek the solace in his arms that she knew he was offering, but she was frozen in her grief and fear, unable to break out of the silence that had fallen between them for the past few weeks. 

She nodded in mute frustration, and as he waited, still watching her. When he moved, it was to step gracefully backward through the open door. He pulled it closed, watching her until she couldn't see him anymore. Hannah's excited chatter was muffled as they moved away.

She crossed over to the window and watched Hannah dancing around Mulder as they moved across the parking lot, his dark overcoat billowing around his legs in time with his long strides. He was laughing as he scooped Hannah up and swung her over a pile of snow to stand on the sidewalk, letting her press the button to get the walk signal. He held her hand as they waited. She was gesturing with one mitten-clad hand, and bouncing up and down with excitement. Halfway across the street, they slipped into shadows and she was surprised to find herself straining to see them, hands against the cold glass. She drew back in surprise as the stones on her left hand glittered in the room's light. 

When they'd stopped for their last gas and bathroom run before getting to Springfield for the night, he'd stopped her before she got out of the car. Hannah was dozing in the backseat again, and Mulder kept his voice low. "I thought we'd have some time this morning to talk by ourselves, but it didn't work out that way." He pulled a small box out of his pocket. He sighed. "It'll be easier for us to pass as a family if we look more the part." 

He opened the velvet box. Inside it was a thin platinum band crusted with diamonds, and a matching old-fashioned looking square-cut diamond surrounded by smaller stones that diminished into a trail of diamonds around the band. She knew that she was staring at him with her mouth hanging open. "Please, Scully?" His voice was quiet, but there was no mistaking the tone. Fox Mulder was begging her to play along. "I promise that I'll explain when Hannah's asleep for the night. Can you just trust me for now?"

Her eyes were heavy with tears when she reached for the band, and her fingers trembled as she slid it on. It was a perfect fit. She stared at it for a minute, starting when the diamond ring appeared in her line of vision. She could see that Mulder wanted to put it on her, but he had hesitated to touch her since she had flinched away from him earlier. She extended her finger, and he slid it gently down past the first joint, careful not to touch her. His care made the situation even worse. When she went to move the ring the rest of the way down, he withdrew his hand swiftly. If she hadn't known better, she'd think that he'd done so to wipe at his own eyes. She wasn't sure what he had to cry about, although her eyes were filled with tears. This whole situation was just so wrong, almost like a mockery of what might have been. 

When Mulder went out to put gas in the car she blew her nose and wiped her tears, watching him move around at the pump. It was only then that she noticed that he'd conjured up a gold band for himself from somewhere and put it on. At the diner later on, they'd looked the perfect family, with Hannah enthusiastically calling Mulder 'Daddy' every chance she'd gotten. She had yet to once call Scully 'Mom'.

Dana Scully looked at the rings sparkling in the cheap light of their motel room. Were they real? Or were they just another part of the roles they were playing: Mommy, Daddy and Hannah makes three. The tears were hot beneath her eyelids again when she pulled the curtains closed and went to turn the taps on in the bathroom and then to collect her things. Although she could have taken the rings off, now that she was securely in the room for the night, she did not. 

She didn't think about what that meant, or allow herself to dwell on why exactly it was that she fought back her tears in the too-small motel tub. 

~*~

It was the little things that were wearing her down, chipping away at her resistance bit by bit. She'd seen a man creating an ice sculpture once, and she was amazed at how he coaxed the shape of the mermaid out of the square mass of the ice in front of him. Mulder was working on her bit by bit, pulling her into this world he was creating with Hannah. He was doing it by making it clear that she was free to join in, but that she needn't feel obligated. If she'd asked, she was sure that Hannah would have told her that Mulder was paying attention to her every move, and it's true, he was. But he was eminently capable of paying attention to more than one thing at a time, as he proved when he was helping Hannah get ready to take her shower. Scully had booted up her laptop to compose a brief message to the Gunmen from one of her anonymous e-mail accounts, and was waiting for the dial-up connection to the internet to be verified. Once again, she was treated to the sight of Mulder with a hairbrush as he patiently brushed the mass of Hannah's hair into some sort of order, before inexpertly trying to smush it atop her head to be held by the too large shower cap. In so doing, he positioned Hannah so that Scully had a perfect view of the unmarred nape of her neck and the top of her spine. She felt some of the tension in her body ease at the sight, as an unaware Hannah giggled at Mulder's inefficient attempts to get her hair into the shower cap. 

While he was brushing her hair, Mulder told Hannah that he used to brush his little sister's hair. "It was really curly," he told her, "and it would get tangled really easily. Sometimes my mom would get a little impatient with the knots and the snarls …"

"But you never did," Hannah finished triumphantly.

"Well," Mulder shrugged, "that's not exactly true. I tried not to hurt her as much as I could, but sometimes I did anyway."

Scully's hands stilled on the keyboard; she could feel the weight of Mulder's gaze upon her. She kept her eyes on the blinking cursor for as long as she could, but when Hannah asked Mulder a question about the playground, thought it was safe to raise her eyes. Mulder's hands were trying to stuff Hannah's hair under the cap again, but he would have been doing a better job of it if he hadn't been watching her instead of what he was doing. She felt the ghost of a smile come over her face at the intensity of his expression. It was unorthodox and not nearly enough, but she knew an apology when she heard it. 

The moment was broken when Hannah's hair tumbled out of the cap again, and Mulder stifled an oath. "Oh, shi – oot!" he said, lamely.

"Hannah," Scully said, not breaking eye contact with Mulder. "Let me see if I can do it, OK?"

Hannah was surprised but trotted over to Scully easily. She brushed Hannah's hair, finding it free of all tangles, then scooped it into her hand, making a ponytail which she twisted up onto the back of Hannah's head. Holding it there, she put the shower cap on back-to-front and tucked the excess elastic over onto itself. It was a quick fix, but it would probably hold for a shower. "Are you sure that you can wash yourself?" she asked Hannah, trying to sound kind, rather than brisk.

Hannah shrugged. "I always took a shower at the hospital," she said. "But my hair would always get wet." She patted her cap. "Thanks."

Scully smiled at her, but noted that Hannah had yet to call her by any name, not just 'Mom'. She sighed and went back to her e-mail. It's not that she wanted Hannah to call her mother exactly, but if she was her mother … She pushed the thought away, and then went on to surf the day's news while she waited to see if there would be a response from the Gunmen. With Hannah in the bathroom showering, the room was suddenly very quiet. She felt herself tense up again.

"Scully," he said, "I went back to the Gunmen's after that day."

She nodded, raising her eyes to his. 

"Some of the files that they had led me in some interesting directions."

"Obviously," she said dryly.

"I didn't really know what I was going to find," he said.

"But then you found Hannah," she said.

"I found Dr. Scanlon," he said quietly. 

She jerked at the mention of Scanlon's name, but her mind was racing, thinking back to the bruises on Mulder's hands. There must have been some sort of struggle.

"He got away." She stated this far more calmly than she felt.

Mulder sighed. "The cavalry arrived. I was tracking him when I found Hannah in the back room of another clinic." He continued off her quizzical look. "They called it a hospital. Scully –" he broke off. "Hannah remembers other children being with her at the hospital."

Scully broke away from his gaze and walked over to the window, pulling the curtain back to look at the featureless parking lot blindly. "How many?"

Mulder was silent behind her in the room. She looked over her shoulder and saw him hunched over on the side of the bed, staring at his feet, still clad in their wingtips. He was clenching the muscle in his jaw. 

"How many, Mulder?"

"I don't know," he said. 

She made a dismissive noise.

"I don't, Scully." He stood up and took a step toward her, then halted. "I thought I was breaking into a records room, with files about one of their secret projects. I had no idea that there would be a child in the room." He ran his hands through his hair and began pacing in the small space. "They left her in there alone at night, with the TV on for company."

"Alone?" Scully asked, and then wondered why she was so shocked.

"She was monitored," he said, "but not well. The alarms didn't sound until after I left the room with her. We were almost out the door when the security guard came after us." He turned toward Scully. "I couldn't leave her there all alone, in that room with those empty beds." He stopped at a noise coming from the bathroom, and walked to the door. "Hannah? Are you OK in there?" he called. 

"I'm all done," she said. 

"How many empty beds, Mulder?" She asked. Her voice was rough with exhaustion. 

"Three," he answered as Hannah came out the door. Her nightgown was buttoned wrong, and her hair was damp around the edges. 

"Can you help me with the toothpaste?" She asked Mulder. 

"Sure, honey," he answered, pulling off the cap, and crouching down to fix her buttons. "Did you clean behind your ears?" He checked behind them, making her giggle.

"How would I get dirty behind my ears?" she asked Mulder. It was clear that she found him extremely silly. 

"It could happen," Mulder said.

"How?" she demanded, raising an eyebrow.

"Maybe when you were on the seesaw," Mulder said easily, moving her into the bathroom, "you kicked up some dirt and it landed right behind your ears."

"That couldn't happen," Hannah said, skeptically. "It would be all over my head!" 

"Oh, you think so, do you?" Mulder asked, handing her the brush. 

"Yes," Hannah argued, brushing and talking at the same time.

"Less talking, more brushing," Mulder said. "Maybe there's some of that dirt on your back teeth."

Hannah's protest was garbled.

"Mad dog!" Mulder said, wiping off some of the froth as Scully watched. "Here, go over the sink so you won't get it all over the floor." He lifted her up to reach.

Scully could feel herself smiling, but her chest felt unbearably tight. Behind her, she heard the chime of incoming e-mail and dragged herself away from the vision of a life that wasn't really hers to hard cold reality. Frohike's encoded note was terse, but reassuring. They'd watch all channels at the bureau and let her know when the alarm was raised at their disappearances. He gave instructions, encrypted of course, as to where and how to contact him next. She was surprised that the e-mail didn't self destruct after thirty seconds. 

Hannah came out of the bathroom and hovered near the table. She could hear Mulder grumbling in the bathroom about all of the puddles left on the floor and wondered if there would be any dry towels for the morning.

"G'night," Hannah said very quietly.

"Good night, Hannah," Scully said. She stood up and held out her hand to Hannah. She could see that Hannah was surprised and unsure, so Scully took her hand and led her to the bed, pulling back the covers. "Who do you want to come in with you?" Scully asked, patting the bed so that Hannah would get in.

"My tiger," Hannah whispered. 

Scully handed her the tiger, and crossing to the other side of the bed, lined up all Hannah's stuffed animals, tucking them under the covers. When she finished, she returned to Hannah's side, smoothing the covers over her. "There you go," she said, "now all of your friends are tucked in with you." 

"Thanks," Hannah said, smiling shyly. 

"You're welcome," Scully said, smoothing the hair back from Hannah's forehead. She really was a beautiful little girl, and Scully ached to think of her having been so alone in such a place. It didn't matter whose child she was – no child deserved such a life. "Do you want me to leave the light on?" She asked Hannah, indicating the lamp over her bed. 

"Off," Hannah whispered, "but …" she hesitated. "Could you put the TV set on?" she asked. "I always sleep with it on." Her face was worried, as if Scully might deny her that one comfort. 

"Sure," she said lightly. Leaning forward, she whispered conspiratorially to Hannah. "Mulder can't sleep without the TV set on, either."

Hannah's eyes shone. "Really?" 

"Really," Scully answered, and then surprised both of them by kissing Hannah on the forehead. "Go to sleep, Hannah." 

She stood up and walked over to the TV set. In the reflection of the bureau mirror, she could see Fox Mulder standing in the bathroom door, gripping a damp towel in his hands and watching her with an anguished expression on his face. She switched on the TV and found a re-run of an old sitcom. Turning the sound down low, she sat back down at the table and determinedly began to surf the net. 

~*~

Mulder was dozing when she came out of the bathroom, but he stirred when she swung the door nearly closed, leaving enough light seeping out for Hannah to see where the bathroom was if she woke in the night. When her eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light, she could see Mulder's cat's eyes glittering from underneath long lashes via the reflected strobing of the TV. He was lying on the bed in seeming repose, eyes mostly closed, ankles crossed, sleeves rolled up. He'd look relaxed if not for the fact that he was atop the covers with his shoes and belt still on, not to mention the implied menace of the loaded SIG Sauer close to his right hand. As she went around the room, making sure the curtains were drawn and shutting off the light on the bureau, Scully could see the gun in his ankle holster where his pants had ridden up. 

He turned his head toward her when crept up between the two beds to check on Hannah, her silk pajamas making a gentle noise as they rubbed together in the near silence. Mulder had muted the sound of the TV set and turned on the closed captioning so that he could listen for any outside disturbances. He was lying on the right side of the bed that had the clearest shot at the door; Hannah was on her side facing him, across the small space that separated their two beds. She smoothed the covers up under Hannah's chin, then froze when Hannah stirred, mumbling something before she returned to sleep.

When Hannah had completely stilled, she crept away from the bed and went back around to the empty side of Mulder's bed, and opened the bathroom door a bit more. Then she pulled her service weapon from the waistband of her pajamas and placed it on the bedside table, feeling Mulder jerk with surprise when she pulled the covers down to slide under them. 

"Scully?" he asked.

"What?" she answered quietly, wondering what he would say. She knew that he'd expected her to sleep with Hannah.

He was quiet as she settled down, turning on her side so that she could see Hannah sleeping. Her stuffed tiger was clutched tightly to her chest, and if Scully squinted, she could see the REM movements behind her eyelids over the rapid rise and fall of Mulder's chest as he lay next to her, puzzled and wary. She raised her eyes to find him studying her.

"What?" she asked again.

"Are you all right?" he asked her. His concern was sincere, and she knew his question wasn't about her sudden decision to share a bed with him. 

Her gaze returned to Hannah's face. Now that the child was asleep, she could look at her with abandon, analyzing how exactly it was that she resembled, or didn't resemble, Emily. Hannah's hair was darker and far more thick than Emily's had been, and unlike Emily's stick straight strawberry blonde hair, it was a mass of heavy waves. Emily's face might have been very much like the childhood version of Melissa's, but Hannah's hair, from its coloring to its texture, was very much Melissa's. Hannah's face was longer than Emily's had been, the line of her chin not as sharply defined in its oval shape. And her eyes, with their long dark lashes and deep blue color, were nothing like the typical Scully blue eyes. She watched Hannah over Mulder's chest, noting that his respiration had decreased as his surprise at her presence faded.

"I don't know, Mulder," she answered. "I don't know how to answer that question."

She shifted under the covers and Mulder's left hand came up off them to let her maneuver more easily. She stared at his ring for a moment, and then asked the question she wanted answered, rather than the one that he expected her to ask.

"Where did your ring come from, Mulder?" 

"I had it in the box with the other ones," he answered her.

She looked up at him sharply, wondering if his inability to give her a straight answer was due to his hiding something or if it was just a habit. Were these his rings? She stared at her hand, wondering if the rings she was wearing had been meant for some other woman. The idea that she might be wearing a ring he'd bought for Diana Fowley made her feel distinctly ill. 

"That's not what I meant, Mulder," she said shortly. 

He looked at her for a moment, his head turned on the pillow. He held up his hand. "Technically, I guess the ring is mine," he finally said.

She raised an eyebrow at him, but said nothing, hoping that he would expand upon his answer.

"This is not a happy story, Scully," he warned her. "Do you really want to hear this now?"

"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know the answer, Mulder," she challenged him.

He sighed, and turned his head away from her. The room fell to quiet, and Mulder's profile was lit by the blue fluorescence of the TV screen, as he stared at the ceiling. 

"I had one really good friend at the Academy," he began. "Dean was just …" He sighed and stopped again. "He was just a good guy. Everyone liked him, but he was my friend." Mulder paused. "Even after the whole Monty Propps thing happened and Patterson – he never treated me any differently. He was curious about how I figured things out, but that was more because he was trying to understand my process."

He was quiet for a minute, looking at the ring. "You know, maybe it was because we weren't competitors," he said. "Dean was brilliant, but not interested in the BSU, much to Patterson's chagrin." He looked over at her. "He was interested in bank robberies, or maybe organized crime, you know?"

"Ah," Scully said, having met the type in her day. "The real G-Men."

"Yep," Mulder said, spinning the ring on his finger. "Yep. I went to BSU and he went to the BRTF. We played basketball, we swam. He had a girlfriend from college, a nice girlfriend," he felt compelled to point out, "that he asked to marry him when we were two years out of the Academy."

"What was her name?" Scully asked.

"Her name is Lindsay," Mulder answered. "She said yes. Dean asked me to be the best man."

Scully had foreseen the end of the story since Mulder had started talking. He'd never mentioned a friend named Dean, and she was sure that she would have met him at some point in the past six years. "The wedding was two weeks away when he was killed." He rubbed his brow as if he had a headache. "Bank robbery bust gone bad. The SAC fucked it up royally, and Dean got a bullet under his arm."

Scully could picture the injury, had seen what would happen when the bullet circumvented the protection of the vest. 

"I'm sorry, Mulder," she said quietly. 

"He'd already given me the rings," he said. "Lindsay told me to keep his. I don't think she could face having it, and not him." The stark statement broke her heart. He was quiet for a few moments, then said, "I was so angry after Dean died. Not only was it a bad bust, but the guys they did catch weren't the ones running the show. These guys were organized, intelligent – everything the perps they busted weren't." 

She nodded, listening. "You found them."

"Oh yes, I did," Mulder said, and although his voice was light, there was an edge in it that was uncompromisingly hard. "I put on Dean's ring, and I put my head down and it didn't matter what Patterson threw at me, it didn't matter that it wasn't my case, I found them all."

"What do you mean?" Scully asked.

"It was a ring," Mulder said, "ironically enough. They'd been running bank robberies for years, getting more and more sophisticated. Money-laundering, funds trading, the whole nine yards. It was an international operation. When I ran out of Americans, I kept going and turned the case over to Interpol. It took me well over a year, between cases for Patterson, to do it all. I wore this ring that whole time."

"That must have gotten a few comments," Scully remarked.

"So I was told," Mulder said, "later. At the time, if I heard any cracks I just ignored them. None of those guys were worth a damn anyway, not compared to Dean. When I couldn't do anymore to break the ring, I focused on the SAC who fucked up the bust. Lindsay's father was more than happy to help."

"Lindsay's father?" She asked.

"Senator Matheson," Mulder answered shortly. "Of course, he knew my father too, so that helped."

Pieces of Mulder's history were reforming themselves in Scully's imagination. "How's Lindsay?" she asked.

Mulder shrugged. "Still single," he answered. "She adopted a baby girl from Guatemala last year. She seems happier."

Scully felt a twinge of something -- jealousy or identification -- or both.

"Do you see a lot of her?" 

Mulder shook his head. "I haven't seen her in years," he said. "I get the occasional e-mail, a card at the holidays. We talk every year on the anniversary of Dean's death. She moved out to California about a year after I got the X-Files."

Scully couldn't help the next question. "So, she met Agent Fowley?"

"You could say that," Mulder answered grimly. He was silent for a minute, then turned his head to look at her again. "They didn't get along."

'Imagine that,' Scully thought, although all she said was, "Oh?"

Mulder was looking at her levelly. "I know that you don't like Diana, Scully," he said. "Lindsay didn't either." He thought for a minute. "Well, she didn't trust her. But Diana was my partner at a critical point in my life. I was pretty lost." He was watching her, gauging her reaction. "I was drinking a lot, too much for a man with my family history, and I was smoking constantly. I didn't sleep. I'd stopped exercising, and after cracking the bank robbery ring, I was adrift. I needed a focus. She got me to do all those things, and eventually, she convinced me that I needed to take off Dean's ring and move on, to focus on my career, to do something with my life."

'Oh, Mulder,' Scully thought sadly. 'You were so ripe for the picking.' 

"Diana did a lot to help me pull myself back together, and yes, she set me on the path that I've been on for the past few years. And no matter what, Scully," he said, turning over on his side to face her, "no matter what, I'll never regret that path because it led me to you."

She sucked in her breath in surprise, and felt her eyes well up with tears.

"I'm sorry for what it's cost you," he said, "I am. But I can't regret it."

She could feel her mouth trembling as it tried to smile and to cry at the same time. 

He lifted his hand and tentatively traced her cheek softly with the first and second fingers of his right hand. 

Her eyes dropped closed and she turned into his touch, as his fingers, feather light, skimmed over her jaw line. She felt his breath against her skin for long seconds before he placed a lingering, tender kiss against her forehead, and then another glancing one against the corner of her eye. "Please don't cry anymore, Scully," he said softly. "I can't take it."

Outside, voices were suddenly audible, then a car door slammed and an engine started up. Mulder leapt from the bed and stalked to the window, his weapon pressed against his leg as he flattened against the wall to check out what was going on. He pulled the curtains open carefully as another door slammed, followed by the sound of a second engine whining in the cold. It was quiet for a couple of minutes, save for the sound of the cars warming up, then headlights slid across the ceiling as, one after the other, the cars backed away. Scully was sitting up in bed, gun in hand, as Mulder moved to the other window scanning the parking lot to make sure that all was well.

"No Tell Motel?" She asked as he walked back to the bed.

He nodded, and stared down at her, clearly uncertain of whether or not he should assume his former position. She returned her gun to the nightstand and pulled Mulder's pillow out, laying it atop the bedspread on his side of the bed, before returning to her recumbent position. "You gonna stand there all night, Mulder?" she asked. "It'll be hard for me to sleep while I'm feeling bad for you."

Fox Mulder smiled at her, his vulpine grin showing even white teeth that she hadn't seen for weeks on end, just before he bounced down next to her. "You gonna crack jokes all night long, Scully, or are you actually going to get busy with the drooling?"

She ignored him, then bunched her pillow up so that she could see more of Hannah's sleeping form over Mulder's chest. They lay there in the silence for a few minutes, both of them breathing easier than they had in a while, until she spoke.

"Mulder?" she said. 

He hummed inquisitively, turning his gaze from where it had been caught by David Letterman interviewing some starlet. 

She sighed, wondering if she dared to break the fragile peace that lay between them, but knew that she couldn't live with unspoken words building more walls to separate them. She took a deep breath in, and laid her hand on his left bicep, feeling the warmth and strength of him. He stilled at her gesture. "I think Lindsay was right about Agent Fowley." 

She looked at him, but his face was neutral. "I … there are things from my abduction," she said carefully, feeling him tense at this turn in the conversation. "I can never be sure, Mulder," she wanted to be very clear about that. "Well. I could never prove it to you." She paused. "But over the past few years, I've begun to remember things." She could see how startled he was by her revelation, and she hastened to explain. "All I remember are bits and pieces of what happened to me, but," she bit her lip and looked down again, then up at him. "Mulder, I remember Agent Fowley."

"Scully …" his voice was merely breath, the utterance one of shock, but she was gratified that he did not seem to be disregarding what she was saying.

"I'm reasonably certain that …" it was harder to say out loud than she had imagined it would be. "Mulder, I remember Agent Fowley being on the train car," she finished. "When they did what they did to me, she was working with them."

*~*


	2. Chapter 2

~*~

Mulder was asleep when she awoke in the early morning, surprised to find that she had both her arms wrapped around his left one. She was holding it to her chest the same way that Hannah held the tiger to hers, like a bulwark against loneliness. Even more shocking was the fact that her fingers were laced through his. His head was turned toward hers on his pillow. Despite the horrible content of their last conversation, his face appeared peaceful, even happy. She searched his expression for any hint of a smirk, flushed at the thought that he'd been awake when she'd wrapped her arms around his and pulled in close. She wondered which of them had taken the other's hand, but surmised that this had been Mulder's response to her overture, from the way her hand was held inside his. It seemed like an echo of the careful regard he'd shown for her during the remainder of their conversation.

She'd fallen asleep during one of his long periods of silence between questions, aware that his mind was racing to assimilate the things that she'd told him, that he was formulating theories and drawing conclusions. After his initial shock at her statements about Diana Fowley, he'd pressed her for details about what exactly it was that she remembered from the time she was abducted. She felt that he was being careful not to press the Agent Fowley issue too hard, and for that she was grateful. 

Talking about any of what she remembered had been extraordinarily difficult for her. She didn't like to think of herself as being uncourageous, but knowing that she had been spread wide open on a table while unknown men inserted their hands and devices and God knew what else inside her vagina to steal her ova was –- well, if it wasn't the definition of medical rape, she didn't know what was. The very idea of it was both obscene and humiliating. She had fought so hard to be seen as an equal in a patriarchal world and to be reduced in such a way, to have her choices and her essence stolen from her, was beyond demeaning. The idea that another woman would have participated in the acts that had violated her was an elemental betrayal that made her loathe Diana Fowley all the more. 

Mulder had wondered if there was something particular about her, and her DNA that had made her a subject, and although the argument smacked a little of blaming the victim, she gave serious credence to the notion. She had always assumed that Duane Barry had snatched her to forestall his own kidnapping, as he'd said. But why her? Had his implants compelled him to take her? Was there something particular about her, or was it merely her proximity to Mulder that had placed her in harm's way? She shifted her hand out of Mulder's carefully, and unwrapped her stiff arms from around his. Her right shoulder was still thoroughly asleep from having been laid upon all night, but her bladder was wide awake and functioning. She shuffled into the bathroom rubbing her shoulder, aware that Mulder had awakened as soon as she moved. 

When she re-entered the room, Mulder whispered, "Good morning," in a husky voice. 

She smiled to see that he was rubbing the blood back into his left arm. "Sorry," she whispered back. 

"Don't be," he answered her, and she stopped at his words, then sat down on the side of the bed she'd vacated. "Don't be sorry about any of it," he said. "I'm glad you told me, and I …" 

Hannah rustled in her bed, making a whimpering noise, and then stretched before falling back into a disturbed sleep. 

Scully glanced at the clock. It wasn't quite six o'clock, and by her calculations, Hannah had only been asleep for about nine hours, far less than she needed at her age. "Shhhh …" she shushed Mulder, indicating the child. "Let's let her sleep a little longer." 

He nodded, watching Hannah move in her sleep. Her tiger had gotten jammed up under her pillow in the night, and the toys lined up on the other side of the bed were in a jumble.

"Mulder?" she whispered, waiting until he turned to look at her. "How old is Hannah?"

He shook his head, "I'm not sure" he said. "I think that she's between 4 and 5, but that could be on some of the discs I stole from the clinic." He shifted off the bed and went to his suitcase, pulling out a case of zip discs. "Do you think your laptop can read these?"

"I brought the external drive with me," she answered, moving quietly to the table where her laptop was and turning it on, "but I'm not sure how good the decryption software I've got installed is." 

"Well," Mulder answered ruefully, "I've got nothing with me. I thought I'd be taking these discs home to crack." 

"When did you find Hannah?" 

"On Friday," he said, "the night after you followed me."

She started in surprise, almost dropping the drive on the table as she took it out of the pocket of the bag. "You saw me?"

Mulder imitated her, giving her the eyebrow.

"I was in a different car," she protested, whispering fiercely. "I covered my hair!"

Mulder looked at her fondly. "I'd know your face anywhere, Scully." The warmth in his voice reminded her of the tender way he'd touched her the night before and she felt herself flush suddenly, her skin tingling. 

"Oh," she said, staring at him. 

He stared back at her, his expression filled with emotion. The sound of her computer booting up provided the soundtrack for their fraught exchange. 

"So you weren't going down by the river," she said. 

He smiled. "No," he said, eyes twinkling. "Did you go dancing?" 

"Mulder," she said, rolling out his name. 

"Anyway," he said, stretching up into the air. She could hear his spine cracking. "I drove to Albany. I'd traced another potential clinic site there to a mostly deserted strip mall, and I observed it for a while, then caught some zs at a highway motel. I broke in after hours. There'd been nobody in or out of the building for a long time, and the security guard was asleep in his little booth. I thought that it would be a quick, uncomplicated job."

She nodded, glancing over at Hannah, who had turned over again, and motioned for Mulder to lower his voice. 

"She was behind a door that said 'Medical Records: No Unauthorized Admittance'," he said wryly. 

"What did it look like inside?" she asked him.

Mulder paused, pursing his lips and giving the description some thought. "Well. It wasn't a records room," he said, hands on his hips. He was bending slowly from side to side, still stretching out. It was actually quite distracting. "There was a small room, almost like a vestibule when you opened the door. Desk, lamp, file cabinet, computer. That's where the discs were," he said. "There was a locked case on top of the desk. I took the whole thing, but those pass keys Frohike gave me opened them." 

She nodded, sticking the first disc in the drive and activating the decryption software.

"There was a microphone on the desk, like an old-fashioned PA, and there was a small room visible beyond it. The first room looked like a really tiny nurses' station, and the next room was like a supply room. It had stuff."

"Like what?"

She watched him think. "IV bags, gloves, syringes, masks, scrubs," he added thoughtfully, "And those hazmat suits on a hook on the right hand wall."

"The full suits?" Scully asked him, surprised. 

"Yeah," Mulder said. "At that point, I thought that it was going to be another ova storage room behind there, or a lab with more embryos." He paused, gauging her response. When he'd told her about her ova after she'd found Emily, they'd had a lot of conversations about what information she expected to be told about. She'd been very clear, and very angry at his unwillingness to tell her the truth in some misguided effort to spare her. Those who had taken her had given her no such consideration, and keeping the truth from her only served to compound their crime. It was her body that had been violated, and her DNA that had been taken for experiments that she would have never authorized. Her not wanting to think about the things that had been done to her was her own choice –- but if there was information out there about her or her ova, it was her right to know it. For all they knew, Hannah could have been one of the embryos that he'd found in California. 

"Go on, Mulder," she whispered. 

He sat down at the table across from her, his eyes coming to rest on Hannah, curled in her bed. 

"There were two windows on either side of another door, but the curtains were drawn on the inside. The lock was electronic, coded, but that keypad bypass that Frohike gave me cracked it in a few minutes. You'd think that an international conspiracy could afford better security."

"Mulder," she huffed in exasperation, wanting him to get to the meat of the story.

"There's not much more to tell, Scully," he said. "I opened the door and there were four beds, set up like a small hospital ward, with two TVs hanging from the ceiling. Hannah was in a bed near the windows, fast asleep. She was holding one of those coughing pillows like a teddy bear, and the TV was on above her bed. It was some show on Nickelodeon." He stared at Hannah, and then turned to Scully. "She was so tiny in the bed. She woke up and looked at me with those big eyes and said, 'Who are you?' and … she didn't even have a coat, Scully. I don't think she'd ever been outside. I wrapped her up in blankets and carried her out of there. I gave her the box of discs to hold. The security guard was so startled that he couldn't get his gun out of his holster, which is the only way we escaped disaster. I put her in the car and drove and drove. I headed back to DC but decided that going home was foolish. I made a pit stop for a couple of items I needed then I stopped at our storage locker outside Baltimore -- I got some ID and other stuff, and then went to a mall to get Hannah some things."

She nodded. "That must have been interesting," she said. 

"I wore the ring," he answered. "I told the saleslady that our house had burned down -- that you were away on a business trip and I came home from work and fell asleep on the couch after I put Hannah to bed and some wet laundry in the dryer. That we'd escaped with the clothes on our backs and I had no idea what sizes she wore because you always took care of those things."

She pictured the scene in her head, knowing how charming Mulder could be, but still surprised that even when he was acting, he'd cast her in the role of Hannah's mother.

"She was very helpful," he said.

"I'm sure," Scully said dryly. "How was Hannah?"

"Stunned," Mulder said. "She was really quiet, with all the people and the lights and the noise. I carried her around and just kept talking to her. It played like she was traumatized by what had happened, so it worked. After she was dressed, I ditched my car at BWI and rented a new one using ID from the storage place."

The decryption software beeped to signal that it had identified the length of the string that passcoded the disc. Scully counted the spaces silently, turning the laptop so Mulder could see the screen. "Sixteen," she sighed. "This is going to take forever."

Hannah stirred in her bed, and rubbed her eyes, then opened them. Mulder's face was transformed at the sight of her, his smile brilliant. He got up and crossed the room, crouching by her bed. "Hi pumpkin," he said, "How are you?"

Hannah yawned. "I don't think I look like a pumpkin," she said sleepily. "My hair's not that orange." 

Mulder laughed. "How'd you sleep?" he asked. 

"OK," Hannah said, and tried to sit up but stopped, pushing down the covers. "I'm stuck," she said. Her nightgown was twisted all around her. Mulder stood her up in the bed and helped her get unwrapped. 

"I think that's why Scully wears pajamas," he told Hannah, picking her up. 

"Yes, it is," Scully answered. She wondered if Mulder had any idea how much in love with Hannah he was. 

"Oh," Hannah said, yawning. "I need to pee."

Mulder walked them over to the bathroom and then put Hannah down, bowing as he opened the door for her. 

She giggled and entered the room.

Scully checked the clock on the computer. It was barely 7:00. "You probably should have let her sleep longer," she said to Mulder. "She should be sleeping twelve hours of the day at her age."

Mulder shrugged guiltily. "She was awake," he said. 

Scully gave him the eyebrow, but said no more.

"Any numbers or letters yet?" Mulder asked. 

Scully shook her head as they heard the toilet flush. 

"I'm hungry," Hannah announced as she came out of the bathroom. Her bedhead was truly impressive. 

Mulder picked up his shaving kit. "OK," he said to Hannah. "Let me just get cleaned up and then we'll go get some food, all right?"

Hannah yawned in answer. "OK," she said blearily.

"Are you OK, Hannah?" Scully asked her.

"I dunno," she answered. "I'm sleepy."

Scully gave Mulder a significant look, and he sighed, starting to go into the bathroom, before he turned and looked back at her from around the half-open door. "Sixteen digits?" he asked her.

"Or letters," she said, "but yeah, sixteen. Why?"

He nodded. "Try 00 00 121 336 540 009."

"Mulder?" 

"Just try it, Scully," he urged. "00 00 121 336 540 009."

She keyed in the digits, wondering what on Earth he was up to. The disc drive whirred, and then clicked as the disc opened. She knew her mouth was hanging open.

"It worked?" Mulder asked quietly.

"Yes," she said levelly, waiting for an explanation. 

"Can you brush my hair?" Hannah asked from next to her elbow.

"Sure, honey," she answered, turning to the child. 

Behind her, the bathroom door closed. 

~*~

After breakfast and a stop at the mall to buy Hannah a new hat and some snow boots, they finally got on the road. Mulder was anxious to get going, and positively rushed them through the mall, even putting the kibosh on stopping to get Hannah some new pajamas. Exasperating as he could be, Scully understood. The drive to Rochester should have taken one day, but there was a distinct possibility that they were in for some rough weather. A huge snowstorm was expected to blanket the area in the next few hours, although how far north it was going to reach varied from forecast to forecast. All the meteorologists agreed, however, that the storm was going to be the prevailing weather for the next couple of days. Although they'd decided to push through the storm as much as possible, they both were concerned about driving in horrendous weather with Hannah in the car. 

For her part, Hannah was excited about the possibility of actually being outside in the snow, as opposed to only seeing it from her window or on TV. She'd asked a million questions about why it had to be cold to snow, and how snow felt. Mulder had spent most of the morning listening to Scully's patient explanations to the child, smiling distractedly while he kept the radio tuned to an all-news AM band, looking for information about the snowstorm. She couldn't really blame him for his anxiety –- tramping through snowfields had permanently lost its luster for her after their sojourn to the Antarctic. After a couple of hours on the road, Hannah had finally run out of questions, and fallen asleep in the back seat. Scully saw this as evidence that Hannah was still tired from the night before and was just about to make that observation when Mulder spoke.

"I think that we should let her sleep for about an hour or so, then stop and get some lunch," he said. "If we stop at one of those McDonald's that has a playground, then she can get some exercise before we get back on the road. I'd like to get as close as we can to Rochester today."

"You don't think we're going to make it?" she asked, staring at the ominous sky.

"I have no idea," Mulder said. "But the closer we get, the better off we'll be if we can't get there today."

"Obviously," she answered. 

"Sorry," Mulder said, "I guess I'm just worried. You know these rental cars have horrible tires."

Scully shivered, remembering more than a few dicey drives in their past. She changed the subject. "Where'd that number come from, Mulder?" She watched his hands tighten around the wheel at her question, knuckles whitening. 

"Do you remember when I broke into Dr. Scanlon's office, and met the Kurt Crawford clones in Allentown?" he asked.

She stifled the sharp remark that rose to her lips. "When you found some of my ova?" She paused. "I'm not really sure how I could forget that."

Mulder sighed and shifted in his seat, then cleared his throat and answered in his most 'just the facts' monotone. "When I first met the Kurt Crawfords in Allentown, and they showed me the DNA storage chamber they had for abductees' ova, that sixteen-digit code was on the drawer with your name on it."

Well, she thought. That certainly was an answer.

"Scully," he said. "What are you thinking?

She breathed in and out for a few minutes, trying to gather her whirling thoughts. "Was that code only on the drawer with my name?"

"Yes," Mulder answered. "Other drawers had different codes."

"Was there anything else on the label?"

"A date," Mulder answered. "Your name, that sixteen-digit code and the date October 28, 1994."

She nodded, "Just before I was returned."

"Yes," he said, looking from the road to her. She had been staring straight ahead for this whole exchange, but could see his head swiveling back and forth in her peripheral vision.

"And you think that the date is when my ova were harvested," she stated.

"Yes," he answered.

"So, you're sure that she …" she turned now, to look at Hannah sleeping in the back seat and pointed at herself, just in case Hannah was only dozing. 

Mulder took his hand off of the wheel and covered hers, looking her in the eye. "Yes."

"But she's not like …" Scully protested.

"I don't think she is," Mulder answered. "I think she's different."

"For what purpose was she created?" she whispered, and the tears were thick in her throat. 

"I don't know, Scully," Mulder said. "I promise you, I don't know, but I'm hoping that we can get some answers where we're going."

"Where are we going, Mulder?" she asked pointedly, fighting back the wave of tears with a burst of irritation. She felt that she'd been more than patient in waiting for an explanation.

"I'm pretty sure that I've tracked down some other Crawfords," he answered succinctly. "I know that they were at this location a while ago, and I thought that if anyone had answers," he pointed with his chin toward Hannah in his rearview mirror. "They would."

*~* 

They made it to Iowa City before the snow got really serious, and outside of Waterloo, Mulder made a bad joke about disastrous decisions and then decided to head west on Route 20. She'd argued that point with him. Mulder, of course, was consulting nothing other than the atlas in his brain, but she worried that heading deeper into the storm was a risky strategy. 

"I don't want to go west, Scully," he answered, "but I don't want to go on a secondary road, either, and that's our choice if we continue north from here. You know the plowing is better on the interstates. If we go west about 50 miles, we can hook up with 35 and go north again on a bigger road."

She sighed and consented to the change in plan, turning around to check on Hannah who was quiet in the back seat. "Are you OK, Hannah?" she asked. The child looked terribly bored, and seemed lethargic. 

"It's not as nice as I thought it would be," Hannah answered, looking out at the snow. 

"Let's play a game," Mulder said. "How 'bout … 'I Spy'?"

"What's that?" Hannah asked, and Scully listened as Mulder explained the rudiments of the game. 

It was enough to keep them occupied for a while, but the truth was that it was difficult to focus on the game when there was so little to see other than snow falling. Mulder finally gave up the ghost on driving somewhere outside of Mason City, and Scully was relieved to get out of the snow. It wasn't windy or excessively stormy, but it was snowing hard, and the sky was low and white as far as the eye could see. There was close to a foot of snow on the ground when they stopped, and the weather reports that they'd heard were predicting more of the same until the early hours of the next day. They found a large supermarket and got enough food and supplies to keep them fed and occupied for the next 24 to 48 hours. 

Hannah had been tired and grumpy by the time they'd checked into the motel room and eaten, and had been unusually stubborn about taking a shower. She wanted to lie on her bed and watch TV instead, and Scully'd found herself hiding a smile as she watched Mulder trying to be an authority figure to a crabby child who'd never had a parent. 

"You take your shower in the morning!" Hannah accused Mulder, with a child's unerring sense of fairness coupled with innocent egotism. "So, why should I take my shower at night?"

An exasperated Mulder was momentarily floored by Hannah's question, and Scully thought his next words were going to be 'because I said so, young lady', so she intervened.

"Hannah," she said quietly, "we all have to take showers tonight. Sometimes when it snows, the electricity gets shut off, and it'll be very dark and hard to see in the bathroom if that happens."

She could see that Hannah immediately became worried by such a notion. "No TV?" she asked. 

"If the electricity goes off," Scully said, "so it would be a good idea to take a shower now." She could see Hannah working up to an objection, so she continued on, "and after you take a shower, then you can watch some TV." Her voice was quiet, but firm. Hannah opened her mouth to argue, but Scully deftly blocked the argument with logic. "The person who goes to bed first is the first person in the shower." 

"OK," Hannah said begrudgingly. She collected her things and went into the bathroom, while Mulder threw up his hands. 

Scully snickered and made him trudge outside to throw the garbage from their dinner in the dumpster where it wouldn't stink up their too small living space. 

*~*

Later, while Mulder showered and Hannah slept, she stood next to the window and watched the snow relentlessly piling up outside. If she had to guess, she'd think that they weren't going to be able to go anywhere tomorrow, and the thought made her feel trapped and helpless. They were a little over 200 miles from some potential answers about Hannah … and maybe about herself. It was hard to imagine that after all of the years of assiduously not thinking about things she was suddenly desperate for answers, but it was true nonetheless. She wanted to know what had been done to her, needed more confirmation than a sixteen digit code on a file drawer to believe that this child, no matter who she reminded her of, was hers. 

Hannah tossed and turned, kicking her covers off; Scully moved to her side after she quieted down. Even with so little experience observing her, Scully felt that Hannah was unusually restless. She reached down tentatively and laid her fingers against Hannah's brow. She seemed warm to the touch. Scully swept the hair off Hannah's forehead and moved her fingers behind her ears, and then lower to the maxillary pulse point and listened, counting. She confirmed her observations by checking the carotid and then the radial pulses, placing Hannah's hand gently back under the covers, and smoothing them up over her. 

"Scully?" She could hear the anxiety in his voice, and drew in a breath to calm her own nerves. She'd heard the door open while she was checking on Hannah, but had hoped that she was just being overly cautious and wouldn't have anything to report. 

"I think I know why she was so grumpy earlier," she began, "her pulse is strong and quick, and she feels warm to me," she said. 

Mulder came over to her side and put his hand on Hannah's forehead, then moved it to the back of her neck. He was wearing long pajama pants and a white t-shirt, his hair still damp from the shower. "Scully," he said again, staring at her.

"She has a fever, Mulder." Her voice trembled, and she pressed her fingers to her lips as if that motion could stop what was happening, but her words tumbled out faster and faster. "And I don't have any pediatric drugs, or even a thermometer. I can't get her to take a pill, and what if she's allergic to something? She could have a serious reaction to anything I give her, because we don't know a thing about her, really." Her voice was rising, and she could see that she was alarming Mulder, but all she could think of was that this was how Emily's death had begun. Mulder wrapped her up in his arms and held on to her as she continued to spill out her fears. "What if she's been altered in some way we don't understand when she was created? And it's snowing and we're too far away from Rochester and what if I can't help her …"

He kept saying her name, but it took her a while to hear him over the sound of the blood pounding in her head. He finally took her face in his hands, forcing her to look him in the eye.

"I'm going back to the store," he said. 

"Mulder, it's snowing so hard," she protested weakly, her habit of arguing with him too ingrained to stop even now.

"I don't care," he answered. "I'm going. Tell me what you need."

When she nodded but remained silent, he pulled her in tight again and just held onto her for a few more seconds. She stood with her head resting over his heart, listening to its strong, rapid beat and trying to relax. She didn't know if she was grateful or resentful that he hadn't tried to reassure her that everything would be all right. 

Finally, knowing that she was wasting precious time, she broke out of Mulder's embrace and turned to the table, looking for paper and a pen. When she turned back, he'd already shucked his pajama pants and was rummaging through his suitcase, wearing only his boxer briefs. 

"Mulder," she said and then stopped, unsure of where to begin. 

He looked up from the end of the bed, pulling out the black jeans he'd been wearing the night she followed him. "Just make a list, Scully. Try to think of every possibility. Assume we're going to be here for the next couple of days."

She was terrified by the mere idea, but she sat down and began to write, meticulously running through a mental checklist of all the differential diagnoses for pediatric illnesses that she could recall. She made sure he had his new phone, and then he was gone in a swirl of wind and snow, tires protesting the lack of traction. She closed the door and made herself boot up her computer to reacquaint herself with common pediatric illnesses. 

She feared that anything she could do for Hannah would be less than adequate. Mulder had always been her most challenging (and only living) patient, but he had the advantage of being formed in the usual manner. There was not enough time for her to unbundle the years of experimentation on the disks that Mulder had stolen when he found Hannah. She needed to be logical and to treat for the most probable source of the problem. If the electricity held out and the snow kept on falling, she'd have plenty of time to search for the improbable. The only sound in the room was that of Hannah's too loud breathing. She had shut the TV off so that she could concentrate, but when the windows rattled ominously and Hannah muttered in her sleep, she shot up out of her chair and got her gun, laying it on the table next to her while she waited. Hannah had her tiger for security; Dana Scully preferred her SIG Sauer. She grimly continued with her reading, willing herself to focus on the words.

*~*

There had been plenty of time in her life where she had simply endured, but having had such extensive experience with such undertakings didn't make the hour and a half that Mulder was away from their motel room go any faster. When he returned, she shoved her feet into her boots and went outside to take the first of the bags from his hands, not caring that she was outside in the pelting snow in just her robe and pajamas. He didn't even make an attempt at a smart remark, just handed her one bag while he grabbed another and kicked the car door shut, ushering her through the piles of snow with an arm around her back, another heavy bag banging against her shin as it dangled from his hand. 

Mulder dumped his two bags next to the table and bent down, pulling her boot clad foot toward him. Caught off balance, she braced a hand on his shoulder but continued digging through the bag she'd put on the table. "I'm going to try the Motrin first," she said, shifting to get to the second bag as Mulder pulled at her other boot. He thumped over to the door and toed off his own boots, dropping them all in a heap next to the door. "Did you get some?" He nodded, stripping off his overcoat and hanging it off the door hinge, making sure the door was latched tight. 

"I got the eyedropper and the one with the cup," he answered. "I figured you might need the eyedropper to give it to her if she was asleep." He crossed the room to Hannah's side in three long steps, crouching down beside her. "I got three different kinds of thermometers, too," he said, putting his large hand on Hannah's forehead. "How is she?" 

"I don't know," Scully answered quietly. "How much do you think she weighs?"

"Thirty-six pounds," Mulder said immediately. He looked up at Scully, who knew that her expression reflected her surprise. "Car seats have weight requirements on them," he said, shrugging, "so I weighed her before I bought one. Even if it was off a few pounds, she wasn't heavy enough for the next size up seat."

She shook her head in bemusement. 

"I know," he said with mock modesty, "I'm good."

She smiled at him for the first time in weeks, tossing him the ear bulb thermometer. "Open that up, big guy." 

He grinned at her, and tore the package open with his teeth. She ignored him and double-checked the dose she'd measured into the cup. 

She took the alcohol swabs over to Hannah's bedside and wiped down the thermometer before placing it in Hannah's ear canal. Hannah murmured in protest, but settled down. "Hold this," Scully said, and Mulder placed his hand on the bulb. While they waited for her temperature to register, Scully sucked the dose up into the eyedropper, carefully getting each drop. 

"102.1," Mulder said quietly, when the ear bulb beeped. "That's not too bad."

"No," Scully answered, "but I don't want it to go any higher."

"When is it …" 

She interrupted Mulder before he could finish, "107 or higher is dangerous, but a sustained temperature of 104 or higher indicates a serious infection, usually bacterial."

Mulder's shoulders relaxed. 

Scully slipped the eyedropper between Hannah's parted lips, and was relieved when the child sipped the medication without rousing. It was probably habitual. Hannah most likely had no idea how often she'd been given medication over the course of her short life. She sighed.

"Now we wait?" Mulder asked.

"Now, we wait," she answered.

He nodded and smoothed the hair back from Hannah's brow, kissing her before tucking the covers up around her.

~*~

It was her turn to keep watch, which was just as well, since she didn't think she would be able to sleep anyway. Mulder seemed unconcerned that anyone would try and grab Hannah on such a beastly night, but to Scully it seemed that a night like this would provide the perfect cover. She flattened herself against the wall and peered out from the side of the drapes at the outside world. The night was still except for the constantly falling snow. No car had been by their motel in hours, not even a snowplow on its way to the nearby interstate. The wind had picked up and drifted the snow, but she had to believe that it had snowed several more inches in the hours since Mulder had returned. 

She crossed the room quietly and placed her gun back on the bedside table that stood between her and Hannah. She and Mulder had swapped sides of the bed, but Mulder was curled on his side, facing Hannah even in his sleep. Mulder was a surprisingly quiet sleeper. She'd assumed that he'd snore terribly because of the size of his nose, but over the years had learned that he only did so when he had one of his infrequent colds or was sleeping on his back. Turned on his side, as he was now, he slept with almost no sound, the line of dark lashes resting on his cheek as he dreamt. One hand was placed in front of him, open palm down on the bed. It looked like he was extending it toward Hannah, but she knew that he was looking for her, had watched him place his hand in the space where she'd been lying when she rose 45 minutes ago. She turned from her observation of him when he began to stir. Mulder was a notoriously light sleeper, and she didn't want to rouse him unnecessarily. 

She picked his watch up from the bedside table and watched the second hand roam across its face as she slipped her fingers under the covers to find Hannah's wrist. Hannah slept heavily, but Scully could see the shadows under her eyes, and the rosiness in her cheeks seemed stark, too-bright spots of color against the pallor of her skin. She listened to Hannah's pulse while the wind kicked gusts of snow against the building. It was slower than when she'd checked an hour ago, but still fast and strong for a pediatric pulse. She made a note on the pad on the bedside table, and then picked up the ear bulb and inserted it gently into Hannah's ear. She hadn't let herself check Hannah's temperature endlessly, knowing that it would take time for the medicine to reduce her fever. She held her breath as the numbers rose over 100, and then stopped at 101.2. She sighed. It was a reduction, even if it wasn't as much as she'd hoped.

"Scully?" Mulder was wide-eyed in the dark.

"101.2," she answered. 

Mulder closed his eyes in relief. "It's going in the right direction, Scully."

She nodded absently, drawing the dose up into the eyedropper, and then giving it to Hannah, who had a quizzical expression on her sleeping face. She drew the covers back up around her, then straightened out her animals. She could feel Mulder watching her as she smoothed the hair back from Hannah's brow and sent a silent prayer heavenward, but she didn't turn to look at him again. She felt too vulnerable. Instead, she cleaned up the bedside table and got things ready for Hannah's next vitals check and dosage. She crossed the room and went to the bathroom, washing and setting the cup and eye dropper to sterilize in a plastic container she'd had Mulder buy for the purpose. She used the toilet and washed her hands carefully, swinging open the door to find Mulder sitting on the side of the bed waiting. She was startled and wary to see him so – she wasn't really in the mood for talking, but Mulder stood before she could say anything and moved toward the bathroom, making his intentions clear. She passed him in silence and went to her side of the bed as he closed the door, lying down on her side to face Hannah. 

He was quiet when he came out of the bathroom, climbing into the bed and lying down behind her without comment. Without looking, she knew that his body rested in a pose that was a mirror of hers. He wasn't touching her, but the gap between their bodies, just a few inches, seemed charged with energy. She could feel the warmth emanating from him, and closed her eyes and tried to will herself to relax, and to maintain her position and not to drift magnetically backwards toward him. Last night, when she had been so bold to share a bed with him, the atmosphere had been different. Tonight, something between them had mended, but something else had changed. 

She opened her eyes and watched Hannah sleeping in the faint light that bled out from the bathroom door. Still, it wasn't the right time for her to be feeling this way. It never was. 

She sighed and Mulder stirred behind her, as if roused from a light doze. She felt his hand sliding across the gap between them just before he brushed his fingers over her spine, resting his open hand against her waist. "Go to sleep, Scully," he said thickly, his voice heavy and slow in the mid-night air. "Stop thinking. Rest." The last word was expelled almost on an exhale, and she closed her eyes and tried not to think, willing herself to sleep … and to stay on her own side of the bed this time, keeping the only point of contact between them the one he had initiated.

*~*

She must have fallen asleep at some point, because her first reaction when she rose to that liminal state where thoughts were cascading through the back of her mind and merging with the remnants of her dreams, was surprise at the feel of Mulder's breath against her cheek. Her eyes popped open to see that she was still in the exact same place that she'd been the last moment she'd been aware of, but now she was held fast in Mulder's arms. He was wrapped around her thoroughly, his head behind hers on her pillow. Somehow, he'd gotten both of his arms around her without waking her and gathered her in so closely that her upper body was barely resting on the mattress. His arms were crossed over her torso as possessively as Hannah's around her tiger. When she stiffened in surprise his arms tightened and she could feel a quizzical rumbling from his chest. She forced herself to relax and Mulder's grip on her loosened as he sighed. She could hear his early morning stubble as he rubbed his face against the pillow, his feet shifting restlessly somewhere far beneath her own. 

She shifted a hand out from under the covers to the table, reaching for Mulder's watch. It had been almost two hours since the last time she checked Hannah's vitals. She took one more minute to savor the warmth of Mulder's arms and to record the physical sensation of being held this way. She'd never have imagined Mulder to be a cuddler, or maybe it was just her -- she didn't seem to inspire cuddling in her partners. She'd also never noticed how low in the bed Mulder slept. His feet were definitely hanging over the edge of the mattress -- she could feel the draft from the bottom of the bed where the bedclothes had been kicked out. Mulder's long legs weren't tangled up with hers, though. Curled on her side, her toes were somewhere just below his knees, her bottom pressed against the base of his abdomen, but above his groin. 

That was probably for the best, she mused, and moved to get up, resigned to the fact that doing so would wake Mulder and lead to an awkward scene between them. To her surprise, Mulder moved away from her easily, flopping onto his back but remaining asleep. She stood next to the bed and peered at him. He wasn't pretending. She stopped at the foot of the bed to cover up his big feet as she went to use the bathroom and wash her hands before checking Hannah.

When she returned to the room, she resisted the impulse to take Hannah's temperature again, and just focused on observing her and recording her pulse. It was definitely slower this time, and more relaxed, both good signs. She marked the results down and turned back to the bed to find Mulder's eyes on her. Interesting that he hadn't woken when she'd broken away from him, but now appeared wide awake. 

"Scully?" he whispered urgently, at her continued failure to give him the information that he'd woken up for.

"She's doing fine, Mulder," she answered, slipping under the covers, and reaching for her glass of water to cover the sudden awkwardness she felt. He probably had no memory of holding her in his sleep, an idea that made her terribly sad.

"Scully?" she felt his hand search hers out under the covers and give it a squeeze. 

"I'm OK," she said. "Tired."

Mulder nodded, and got up out of the bed, picking up his gun from the bedside table, and shivering in the cooler air. He prowled to the window and pulled the curtain back warily. "Still snowing," he said. He wandered by the front door, absently checking the bolt and then, scratching his stomach, went into the bathroom. 

When he came back out, she was lying on her back with her eyes closed, trying to will herself back to sleep. She had tried to lie on her side facing Hannah, but her back felt so cold that it practically ached. She chastised herself for feeling bereft over something that was probably just instinct on Mulder's part. It was cold, and she was a warm body in the bed next to him. There was nothing more to it than that. Her rationale firmly in place, she kept herself still when Mulder got back into the bed. The mattress dipped under his greater weight and she felt herself slide a little bit toward him. He turned onto his side, facing her, and after a minute she felt him tuck the blankets down in between them so that she wasn't getting a draft.

"Thanks, Mulder," she said softly, eyes still closed. 

She heard his answering chuckle, and then felt his hand tuck the hair behind her ear. "I got your back, Scully," he whispered.

She could feel herself smiling as she drifted off once more. 

~*~

It was still very early when she awoke for good. Mulder's watch told her that it was just before six o'clock, but his side of the bed was empty. She lay there for a minute, wondering if it was still snowing. She had a few minutes to wait before taking Hannah's temperature again, and if Hannah's fever stayed reduced, she'd like to get some breakfast in her before giving her next dose of medicine. Hannah's four o'clock temperature had been 99.4. It wasn't close enough to a normal temperature for Scully to consider Hannah's fever reduced, but it was a good sign, as was the fact that Hannah's temperature was conforming to normal circadian rhythms despite the persistent elevation. Still … Hannah had to achieve and maintain a normal temperature for at least 24 hours before she'd stop worrying. 

She sighed and sat up, picking up her water glass. Just as she realized that the bathroom door was still slightly ajar, Mulder's head and shoulders appeared, hovering over the foot of the bed. 

"Jesus, Mulder!" she spluttered around a mouthful of water. "What the hell are you doing down there?"

"Push-ups," he whispered, smiling at her. "And be quiet!"

Hand over her pounding heart, she noted his posture, with his hair hanging over his forehead. He was slightly flushed as he dropped back out of sight. She flopped down after placing her water glass back on the nightstand. It suddenly occurred to her that she'd most likely be spending the day trapped in a tiny motel room with a man whose energy level could power a small city on a normal day, and a little girl who was sick. She groaned aloud, but quietly, and Mulder's head appeared over the edge of the bed again. 

"Scully?" he asked, standing up and coming around the bed. "You're not getting sick, too, are you?" He really looked worried.

"No, no," she said hastily, levering herself up on an elbow. "Just, uh … my back kinda hurts."

Mulder looked mystified. "Really?" he said. "I thought that was one of the better motel mattresses I've ever slept on," he was gesturing expansively but whispering, standing there in his too thin pajama pants with his t-shirt clinging to his torso. The muscles in his forearms were corded in definition due to his recent exertions. "I had a great night's sleep." He was just a bit more than six feet of walking temptation, thrumming with energy and total obtuseness.

She bit back a moan at this confirmation of her theory and shooed him back to the foot of the bed. "Exercise, Monster Boy," she ordered. She dropped back down onto the bed.

"Scully!" he whispered from the end of the bed. Sit-ups this time, she surmised, raising her head to see what he was doing. "It's still snowing," he announced. 

She covered her head with his pillow and moaned. Thank God she had reminded him to get more coffee. 

~*~

Mulder was actually surprisingly good at amusing a four-year-old, although Scully wasn't really sure who was amusing whom to watch him playing with Hannah. After watching _Sesame Street_ and a few other more dubiously educational programs, Mulder had turned off the TV set and taught Hannah how to play Go Fish. Hannah was still in her nightgown, looking pale and tired. Mulder had piled pillows behind her to prop her into a sitting position and was sprawled across the foot of her bed, patiently teaching her how to play War. Earlier, he had tried to teach her how to whistle, which had been interesting, since Mulder could barely whistle himself. 

Outside, the snow showed no sign of stopping, although it had slowed down considerably. Weather reports were now predicting that it would continue into the early evening, with final accumulations somewhere in the two-foot range. They had enough food to last another day, but Scully hoped that they wouldn't need to be here longer than the next morning. 

Her research on Hannah was tough slogging. She'd ascertained that Hannah was considered to be four years old, having been 'born' in February of 1995. If Mulder's hypothesis was right, and Hannah was her daughter, that would mean that Hannah's pre-natal development had been somehow artificially accelerated. However, the records Scully had only contained minimal information about Hannah's early years. There was a basic history, with information about when Hannah had achieved certain developmental milestones. Most of those seemed to be later than expected, a fact that Scully was attributing to her abnormal gestational period. In some ways, Hannah's early development was analogous to that of a very premature infant, but looking at Hannah now, Scully could see no evidence of prematurity. Hannah at four would be considered tall and slender for her 'age'; despite her odd socialization in a clinical setting, her vocabulary and conversational skills were high. 

The limited medical history indicated that she'd 'born' as one of four in her group, but from what Scully could glean, they were not clones. There seemed to be subtle embryonic differences between the four girls, which were referenced in the experimental documentation. Scully was forwarding files of RFLPs to the Gunmen for confirmation of variances from the typical genome. With no access to a high-speed internet connection like the one available at work, there was no way that she could verify her thoughts on genetic alteration in a timely manner. It seemed from the limited documentation that she had, however, that the alteration had been made to the germ cells that had been used to make the zygotes, but she couldn't be sure. 

She sighed. It was all so very frustrating. If Mulder was right, and the ultimate goal of the cloning experiments had been to make a hybrid resistant to Purity, then Hannah might be an unusually successful example of that process. Scully had carefully examined her lymph glands this morning, and not only was there no evidence of the green nodule that Emily had had, Hannah's lymph glands didn't seem to be swollen, except for under her jaw and at the base of her ears. There was also the fact that it appeared that her three siblings, all girls, were dead. They'd all undergone the same course of dubious treatment that Hannah had survived. The records referred to those 'experiments' as unsuccessful, and Scully found the use of scientific terminology to cursorily describe the deaths maddening, and had to repeatedly force herself to focus on Hannah's records. She could do nothing for Hannah's sisters – at least, not at the moment. 

Reading Hannah's records was like picking up a book and realizing halfway into it that you were reading the last part of a trilogy. Scully had no proof of the why or how of Hannah's creation, just dizzying piles of data about her responses to obliquely described experimentation. It seemed possible that this experimentation had not begun until the past year of her life, and she could not say for certain what exactly had been done to Hannah. In addition, she could find no record of the common pediatric vaccinations that Hannah should have been given in the first years of her life included in the perfunctory history attached to her experimental records. Nor was Hannah herself a reliable witness to what had been done to her, which meant that Scully had to consider a far wider universe of possible ills than the norm. She simply couldn't assume that Hannah had been appropriately vaccinated, nor could she decipher the mysterious designations for what appeared to be sequences of something vaccination-like that appeared repeatedly in Hannah's records of the past year.

She sighed again, and Mulder looked over at her from the bed. In honor of their snow day, he was wearing his black jeans coupled with one of his work shirts. His long feet were bare, and his hair was flopping over his brow.

"You need a break, Scully," he said.

She eyebrowed him. "And, it's such a nice day for a walk, too," she answered sardonically.

"It is?" Hannah asked, puzzled.

"Oh, snow walks are the best," Mulder answered. "It's so quiet outside and everything looks so pretty." He wrapped Hannah up in the extra blanket from the closet and carried her to the window, pulling back the curtains. "Look at the trees, and the snow on the chain link fence over there."

"It's very pretty," Hannah agreed, putting her hand on the glass and then withdrawing it quickly, "but isn't it really cold?"

"Yes," Scully answered her, stretching up from the chair and wandering over to the window. "But it's nice if you know you're going to come inside and have something warm to drink."

"Like that soup in a cup?" Hannah asked dubiously. She had protested having soup for breakfast, but had rejected the instant oatmeal in a cup outright. Mulder had insisted that she needed to eat something warm, so soup it was.

Scully smiled, reaching up to Hannah to smooth her hair back and surreptitiously feel her forehead. It was still warm, but not worryingly so. "No," she said, "like hot chocolate …" Hannah looked intrigued, "with melted marshmallows."

"That sounds much better than soup," she said enthusiastically. "Do we have any of that?"

Mulder laughed. "Yes," he said.

Hannah sat patiently at the table waiting while Mulder got milk out of the snow-packed Styrofoam cooler and warmed it in the same electric hot pot he'd used earlier in the day. Her continuing quiet was a contrast to her nearly constant chattering from when they'd first met, and was a clear indicator that she was not feeling well.

"Hannah, did you drink milk when you were at the hospital?" Scully asked suddenly. It had just occurred to her that allergies were an immunological response. 

"Yes," Hannah answered, puzzled. 

"Did it look like the kind of white milk Mulder is using," she asked, "or was it more beige?"

"It was white," Hannah said, and Scully nodded, lost in thought, eyes sliding back to the computer screen. 

While they sipped their cocoa, Mulder got coloring books, crayons and colored pencils out of the bags of stuff he'd bought on the first trip to the supermarket. Scully smirked into her cup as she watched him explaining to Hannah how to color. He demonstrated with a double panel drawing of kids playing on a playground. He was coloring the left side of the double picture, and Hannah was supposed to be coloring the right side, but as time went on, she was spending more time correcting Mulder than she was on coloring her own part. She began to sort through the crayons to hand him appropriate colors, emphatically telling him what went where. Mulder dutifully complied, hiding a grin and occasionally hectoring Hannah to color her own side of the picture. It was hardly a surprise that he colored outside of the lines.

Scully absently looked through the assortment of coloring books that Mulder had bought: playground scenes, with simple words; animals in their habitats; a book about families; a book of numbers and letters with simple words and their illustrations; a tablet of blank sheets. The one at the bottom of the pile was filled with complex outlined mosaics, some like stained glass windows, others like the elaborate floors and wall panels that one saw in museums. She glanced up at Mulder to see him watching her. The last book was clearly for her, but she picked up the one about animals in their habitats and began to flip through it.

"Whatcha lookin' for?" Hannah asked curiously. She was sitting on Mulder's right leg, still wrapped in the spare blanket from the closet. 

"Pictures of foxes," Scully answered sweetly.

"Hey …" Mulder warned, while Hannah looked puzzled.

She found what she was looking for and began to sort through the crayons which Mulder had unceremoniously dumped in a pile in the middle of the table, along with an assortment of colored pencils. 

Hannah watched her as she colored the eyes of the fox in with a green crayon, then lightly ran over it with a brown one. "See," she said to Mulder, "she stays in the lines."

Mulder rolled his eyes at Scully, and she stuck out her tongue at him, finding a burnt orange crayon to start coloring in the fox's fur. 

"OK," Mulder said, "but my way is more artistic."

Scully raised an eyebrow at him, and fished around in the unruly pile for a black crayon. She looked at the fox in the drawing and then outlined the animal freehand on the empty page next to it.

"Wow!" Hannah said, impressed. "She made another fox!"

"She's just copying the drawing," Mulder protested. "That's not that hard."

"Oh, right," Scully said, laughing. 

"Your turn, Mulder," Hannah announced. She was flipping through their coloring book looking for a blank page, but there were no pages that didn't have a drawing on them already. Scully helpfully handed over the tablet of blank pages. This time, Mulder stuck out his tongue at her. 

"Fine, fine," Mulder grumbled. "Fine. Hannah, I need you to move you over here."

"Oh, making room," Scully said.

"Art needs room for expression," Mulder loftily responded.

"I'll bet," Scully said, as Mulder began sorting through crayons and pencils. "You're just making a bigger mess," she protested. 

"Scully," he said, waving a pencil at her, "cramping." She rolled her eyes, as Mulder looked thoughtful and began to draw something. "Wait a minute," he said, crossing through that drawing, "I need to start over."

Scully smothered a giggle as Hannah encouraged Mulder, then watched as he began to draw a face on the pad. Her jaw dropped as he began to fill in the small features, until in just a few lines, Mulder had drawn a rough caricature of Hannah.

"That's ME!" Hannah said breathlessly. "You drew ME!"

Mulder was definitely smirking. 

"Mulder …" she broke off, trying to look at the drawing again, which Hannah had scooped up to stare at. "That's really … where did you learn how to do that?" As soon as the words left her mouth, she remembered Mulder during the case that sent Patterson to jail for life, surrounded by drawings of gargoyles.

Mulder shrugged, "Well, one day I was coloring outside the lines and …"

She threw her crayon at his head. 

"Ow," he said, then protested, "You've seen me draw things before."

"Doodling doesn't count, Mulder."

"It does too."

"Now draw her!" Hannah demanded, turning the page. "Right here."

Mulder looked at Scully over Hannah's head. "Right there," he said slowly, and Scully blushed, wondering what exactly he was imagining in his mind's eye. 

"Oh, Mulder," she said, "you don't have to …"

"Yes," Hannah insisted imperiously, "draw Scully." 

She was surprised to hear Hannah referring to her by the name Mulder had given her, but Mulder was already sifting through the pencils, his laughing hazel eyes darting from her to the pile and back. He settled on a drawing pencil a shade darker than his beloved #2s, then glanced at Scully again mischievously before he bent over the pad. She bit her tongue, wondering what her caricature would look like as he began to outline the shape of her face. 

It took her only a few seconds to recognize that he was drawing her expression as he must often see her. Her caricature looked at him skeptically, head tilted back and one eyebrow arched in challenge. She was relieved to see that the expression on her face was amused, and not angry. The words he'd said to her the day before -- 'I'd know your face anywhere, Scully' -- echoed in her memory. As Mulder's hand stilled on the page, she could barely raise her eyes from what he'd drawn in simple lines. She didn't think of herself as being beautiful, but Mulder … the woman that he'd drawn was beautiful. 

"Mulder," she whispered, choked up. "Thanks."

He reached over and touched her cheek. "I got you big time," he said. She covered his hand with hers and nodded, too touched to say anything more. 

"Now, draw me a tiger!" Hannah demanded. 

Scully let go of his hand, just catching one last glimpse of how Mulder saw her before he turned the page.

~*~ 

The hours after lunch were a sharp contrast to the lighthearted fun of the late morning. Hannah's mood had deteriorated, and Scully's suspicion that her temperature was up was confirmed when the thermometer registered 100.7. Still, it took Mulder considerable cajoling to charm Hannah into resting after lunch. He finally laid down on the bed with her to watch cartoons, absentmindedly winding her curls around his long fingers. She fell asleep after Mulder had endured almost an hour of _Rugrats_. He rolled his eyes at Scully after he crept off the bed. "Cartoons were better when I was a kid," he muttered, going to the window to check on the weather. "It's really slowing down."

Scully nodded, only half-listening. 

"Anything interesting?" Mulder asked, sitting down next to her at the table. He was twirling a pencil around his fingers, over and over. His fidgeting was so ingrained that she barely noticed it anymore, but in light of his surprising revelation of the morning, she was viewing his fascination with pencils in a new light. 

"I don't know," Scully said. "A lot of what's been done to Hannah seems like an inoculation series, but … I could be just assuming that because Hannah said she'd been given shots, remember?" she looked at her notes. "But whatever they were doing it seems like they were repeating the same series over and over again."

"Why?" Mulder asked. "And what kind of shots?"

"I don't know," she answered, the frustration evident in her voice. "The abbreviations aren't for any vaccine series that I remember. Arguably, my pediatrics rotation was a long time ago, and I know that a lot of new vaccines have been added to the rotation, but these acronyms don't align themselves with anything on the current schedule of recommended vaccines from the CDC. I sent the guys an e-mail a while ago, and they're searching for the abbreviations, but so far…"

"Do you think they're inoculating her against Purity?"

"I have no idea what they're vaccinating her against," Scully said. "In fact, I can't even say that these are multi-part vaccines, or sequential inoculations, or vaccines at all. It's just the patterning that suggests that they are." 

Mulder looked thoughtful. "Like the kind they give you when you go to Africa or India?" Off her look he continued, "I went to India one summer instead of coming home. Or, are you saying Purity is like rabies?"

"I don't know, Mulder," she said wearily. "I really can't tell anything from these schedules, other than they're sequential, and repeated."

Mulder sighed and turned toward Hannah, who was curled up in a ball in the bed. "Is she sick because she's due for some shots?" 

"I don't know, Mulder," she said quietly.

He turned around and looked at her assessingly. "What's going on, Scully?"

She hesitated, but knew that he wouldn't rest until she answered his question. "I think it's possible that the room that she was in was a kind of clean room," she said, watching his expression carefully. "The Haz-Mat suits, the separate rooms," she continued. "I think that Hannah's not been exposed to a lot of germs."

Mulder closed his eyes and grimaced, "In other words, this is my fault."

"What choice did you have, Mulder?" she answered him. "Do you really think that she would have survived their experiments?"

His eyes popped open. "What're you saying, Scully?"

"Hannah did have three siblings," she said. 

"Siblings? Not clones?"

"Not clones," Scully said. "From the RFLP information that was included in their records, they're not clones. There were subtle differences in the sequences that I could see."

Mulder's brow was drawn down in thought. "Variations on a theme … now why would they do that?"

"I don't know, Mulder. I do know that they were all subjected to the same series of experiments, and only Hannah has survived. If their immune systems were altered, it's a logical deduction that the environment was limited so that it wouldn't have an effect on the experiments, and that those experiments, perhaps in concert with the alterations, were what killed them." 

Mulder pushed his chair back away from the table and strode to the window. He looked furious, but remained silent. She got up and followed him. The snow had slowed down to a trickle, and no longer seemed to be accumulating. The world outside the window was white and still, with nothing moving except for the occasional drifting of the snow. She shivered at the sight.

"What are you thinking, Mulder?"

"I'm not," he said after a minute, "I'm feeling incredibly angry and ..." he shook his head, "After all this time, part of me still cannot accept the absolute barbarity of what they've done." He turned away from the window and looked at her, his eyes dark. "To you, to my sister. How many more do you think there are, Scully? Women and children like Hannah, and Emily. I'm sure you noticed that these bastards never seem to experiment on themselves, and hardly ever on their sons."

She opened her mouth to point out that their experimentation was focused on reproduction, which made their human subject choices explainable, but he continued on, his voice hot and low.

"And is it any surprise, really? How else could it have turned out when they used Victor Klemper and men like him to design their experiments?" He paused, "They're not scientists, they're monsters." He was flushed and couldn't meet her gaze. She wondered exactly to whom he was referring. "Sometimes, I wonder who's worse? What they're claiming to protect us from, or the supposed cure?"

Hannah made a distressed noise in her sleep and suddenly rolled over, diverting their attention to her. Scully noted how she looked with a sinking feeling, glancing over Mulder's shoulder to the unblemished snow outside. There was still no sign of a plow.

He shook his head in frustration. "Damn it!" His voice had dropped back to a whisper, but there was a desperate edge to it. "As soon as they plow, we're leaving," he said intently. "That way, we can get to the Crawfords first thing in the morning at the latest."

She nodded her agreement, and he stared at her, still for the first time in a while, stopped by her lack of argument. "I agree, Mulder," she said quietly. "She's not getting any better. We should go as soon as it's safe."

"OK," he said, snapping back into action. "I'm going to find a shovel to dig the car out." His hand enclosed her wrist for an instant as he passed by her, already in motion. 

~*~

Eight hours later, Scully sat huddled in the backseat of their rental, travel-weary, exhausted and terrified. In her arms, Hannah lay in a stupor, having passed into a quiet, heavy sleep that frightened Scully far more than the fevered thrashing that had occurred most of the car ride. Hannah's temperature now hovered somewhere near 104 degrees. She'd tried to convince herself that it was unlikely to be an accurate reading. Hannah was not only wearing her own coat, but Mulder had wrapped her in the purloined blanket from the motel and his own overcoat. When they finally got into their room, she'd take Hannah's temperature again. She searched for a glimpse of Mulder via the window into the motel office, but he and the proprietor were still out of sight. He'd been outside for a few minutes, bouncing on the balls of his feet and chafing his arms against the cold penetrating his thin suitcoat, ringing the bell of the office repeatedly until a tall older woman, wearing a flannel bathrobe and carrying a double-barreled shotgun, had appeared. 

Less than ten minutes had passed since he entered the door of the office, but Scully felt panicky at being alone with Hannah. It wasn't like Mulder could do anything for Hannah, but while he was there, at least her feeling of impotence was shared. She didn't know what else she could do for the child other than worry. On the long drive as Hannah's fever had raged, and Mulder drove carefully behind the snowplows, inching ever closer to Rochester, she had worried. She worried that the Motrin was no longer reducing Hannah's fever, but was too worried to try another fever reducer. What if Hannah had a reaction to the acetaminophen? Aspirin was out of the question from the reading that Scully had done, and yet it was probably still the most effective fever reducer available. Yet, with visions of Reye's Syndrome and Kawasaki Disease running rampant in her imagination, she wouldn't risk giving Hannah either drug. 

She found herself checking Hannah's lymph nodes again and again, running fingers over them lightly to see if they were swollen. She'd checked the skin on the palm of Hannah's hands repeatedly, and examined her mouth and her tongue with her penlight. 

If Hannah had developed a serious pediatric illness, she would have to wait another eight or nine hours to even begin treatment. Scully felt her scalp break out in a sweat at the very idea and clamped down on the rising wave of panic. They couldn't take Hannah to a hospital – although they would have to if they couldn't find the Crawfords or worse, if there was nothing that they could do for Hannah. Mulder was firm in his belief that the Crawfords would know what to do, and she could only hope that whatever instinct guided his movements was right yet again. Still … the Crawfords last known location was a nondescript office park off secondary roads. The Gunmen were monitoring the plowing being done in the area and had promised to call as soon as the roads were passable. It was all taking too long.

She stared down at Hannah, feeling the solid weight of her in her arms. This was her child, and she was a doctor, and there wasn't a damned thing she could do to help her. She swallowed the tears that threatened to overcome the panic and wondered how in the hell anyone could be a mother when it was such a jumble of overpowering emotion all the time. This child, the one whose possible existence she hadn't contemplated 72 hours ago, had become essential to her just as Emily had before her. How many more times would she have to live this horrendous scenario before her own heart exploded from grief?

She heard the sound of Mulder's voice as he exited the motel office with a key dangling from a big piece of plastic. "Thank you for helping us out," he said with strained civility, "my wife and daughter are very tired." As soon as his back was turned to the door, the polite mask that he'd been wearing crumpled, and she could see the worry and fear return. He ran the few feet to the back door, shivering convulsively in the cold air. She leaned over and unlocked the door across from her just before he fumbled for the handle, sliding a bit on the ice in the parking lot. 

"We're just down the row two doors, and …" he said, as the door opened, but whatever he might have said was lost as he bent down and saw her face. "Oh, Scully," he said sorrowfully. 

She lifted Hannah toward him with arms that had long ago cramped from holding her weight, feeling the imminence of the tears that threatened to overflow at his stricken expression. He leant in across the seat and reached for her instead, cradling the back of her skull in his large palm as he pressed a lingering kiss to her forehead. "I'm so sorry, Scully," he said in anguish. "I wish …"

"I know," she said, "I know." She moved Hannah toward him again as he hovered over her. "Mulder, please," she whispered. "Help me. We need to get her inside." 

He gasped a little at her words, but nodded and lifted Hannah out of her arms easily. Hannah didn't stir at all, and the sight of her so still made Scully question whether or not they should just take her to the hospital after all. She stumbled as she got out of the car, not realizing until she stood upright that her legs had gone to sleep from Hannah's extra weight compressing them. 

"Scully?!" Mulder turned from the sidewalk in front of the car as she clung to the top of the door. Hannah stirred in his arms and half-opened her eyes.

"I'm fine, Mulder," she said automatically, even thought she was dizzy and tired and the world was blurring at the edges. "My legs are asleep. Get her inside." 

Hannah had begun to shiver in the cold, despite all of the protection she had against it. "'m cold," she whined, and Scully felt incredible relief to hear the plaintive sound. 

"OK, honey, OK," Mulder soothed, turning back toward the door, and then peering over his shoulder. "I'll get the stuff from the car in a minute, Scully," he said. "Come with us." 

She nodded and shambled along in his wake, wincing at the pins and needles that ran along her right side and through her legs. She rubbed at her extremities as she moved, stopping to stamp her feet once or twice on the cleared and dry sidewalk. Her head ached with the cold. Shivering, she stepped through the door of the motel room and found, like Alice in Wonderland, that it seemed she'd stepped back in time. The room was nearly the reverse image of the one they'd left eight hours ago, a fact that did nothing to help her muddled thinking. The sitting area was to the right of the door, and the bathroom was at the back, next to the closet. The heap of Hannah's outdoor clothing was piled on one of the two queen-sized beds that were squeezed into the space along the left wall. When she closed the door to the parking lot, a small walkway to maneuver around the end of the second bed appeared. A nightstand between the two beds with a phone and a bureau with a TV set opposite the bed farthest from the door completed the set-up. It was clean and neat, and the only difference between it and the room they'd left behind hours ago was that somewhere along the way, the motel must have had a lodge theme, because the walls were paneled with faux-knotty pine. 

She could hear the low murmur of Mulder's voice in the bathroom, and realized that he was trying to cajole Hannah into using the toilet. She walked over to the wall unit on tingling legs and turned the heat up all the way, then made her way back around the end of the bed and crossed the room to the closet, hanging up her coat. She walked back to the bed, stomping her feet as she went, and found Hannah's coat under Mulder's, hanging it up. She left Mulder's coat where it was in the vain hope that he would actually wear it outside when he went to collect the rest of their belongings. It was useless to suggest to him that the cold made him more vulnerable to illness. Mulder hardly ever got sick; in all the time she'd known him, his visits to the doctor had almost always been due to injury. It was one of his more annoying traits, since she tended to get every cold that passed through the Hoover and hold onto it for a week or two, while Mulder would maybe get a sniffle for a day or two. 

She realized that her thoughts were whirling, but very slowly, and then felt her own forehead speculatively. It was impossible to judge if she had a fever, but her cold hand felt soothing against her head. She took an inventory, running her fingers lightly over the lymph glands in her throat. She was achy, addled and her throat hurt. However, she was exhausted and had been dumping adrenaline into her bloodstream all day while consuming thoroughly inadequate amounts of food. Her jaw ached from tension and her mouth was dry from her nearly constant state of spitless panic. She was, most likely, very dehydrated. 

Mulder brought Hannah out of the bathroom and tucked her into bed, propping her up on two pillows. "I'll be right back," he said to her, his hand circling her elbow briefly as he passed by her. 

She sighed in his wake and went over to the bed to pick up the overcoat he'd ignored and hang it up. Hannah watched her listlessly, already half-asleep again. 

Mulder was back in the room in an instant, dropping bags on and around the table and leaving the door open while he ran back to the car for the last of their belongings. She heard the sound of him skidding, then a curse and a muffled thump like he'd bounced off the car. By the time she got to the door, however, he was already halfway back to the room, holding the cooler in his hands. 

"I'm fine," he announced as he strode by her into the room. "I just slipped."

She closed the door behind him. He had retrieved a Gatorade from the cooler, which he moved toward Hannah with as he spoke. "I didn't flush," he said to Scully over his shoulder, "she hardly peed at all, and it's very dark."

She moved into the bathroom and stared down at the orange liquid in the toilet basin, before closing the door and trying to void her own bladder. Her own output was similarly minimal and dark. She stared at her pale, exhausted face in the mirror. The truth was that she had already been run down before this latest adventure had begun. If what Hannah had was communicable, she was definitely vulnerable to it. There was nothing she could do about it right now. She washed her face and hands and dried them, going back out to the room. 

Mulder had turned the TV on, but was sitting next to Hannah on the bed with his back to it. A half-drunk cup of Gatorade stood abandoned on the night table, but Mulder hadn't given up. He was feeding a dozing Hannah the liquid through one of the unused eyedroppers. She took off her shoes and went to the cooler for a bottle of water for herself, opening it and guzzling it down while she watched him patiently feed Hannah. The set of his back was determined, but he was extremely gentle with the child, not forcing her to drink. He paused between eyedroppers full of liquid, watching to make sure that Hannah swallowed before he continued. She shucked her suitjacket, hanging it up in the closet, then paused. She really should change into more comfortable clothes, but it seemed like such a huge effort at the moment. She stood at the opened door of the closet, swaying in indecision.

"Scully?" Mulder was looking over his shoulder at her. "Are you all right?" 

"I'm so tired, Mulder," she said, after a pause. 

He got up from the bed and took off his own suit jacket, dropping it at the end of the bed, and rolling up his sleeves. He was studying her, as he unknotted his tie and laid it atop the jacket. He toed off his shoes and walked over to her. "Why don't you lie down for a while?" he asked in a gentle voice.

"I …" she started to speak, but his quiet voice undercut hers.

"She can't have any more meds for a while," he said, "and I'm not tired. I'm going to get some more of this Gatorade into her." He ushered her over to the other bed, pulling back the covers. "I promise I'll wake you if anything happens. Just lie down for a while." 

He pushed her gently down to the bed, and it felt so good underneath her that she moaned a little. 

"I really shouldn't …" she protested weakly, but Mulder had picked up her feet and tucked them under the covers. 

"Just rest for a little while," he ordered. 

She closed her eyes. 

~*~

It seemed like only minutes later that Mulder was urging her to wake up, the panic in his blank voice evident. When she started to sit up, he pulled on her hands to aid her; she saw that he was wild-eyed with fear. "Her temperature's 104.5," he said. 

She bolted from her bed and crossed the small space between them to crawl onto Hannah's bed. Hannah's face was flushed with fever, her hair matted with sweat on her brow and at the base of her neck. 

"Did you give her another dose?" She was searching for Hannah's pulse as she spoke. 

"At midnight," he said. He'd crossed to the other side of the bed, and was kneeling by Hannah's side, still wearing his rumpled slacks and shirt. "You were sleeping, so I just went ahead." His voice was anguished. 

"OK, OK," she said, trying to gather her racing thoughts as she counted heartbeats. "Let's get her in the tub."

Mulder shot to his feet, picking up Hannah as he went. Scully crawled all the way across the bed and opened the door to the bathroom, squinting in the too-bright light as she stoppered the tub and turned the water on. She held up one hand to halt Mulder's progress while she made sure the temperature was appropriately tepid. While the tub filled, Scully tried to get Hannah out of her nightgown. Mulder finally sat down on the closed toilet so that they could maneuver Hannah's limp limbs out of the tangled nightgown. Hannah's torso was flushed with fever, her skin dry and hot. 

"You need to hold onto her, Mulder," Scully said, tugging on his arms to get him to stand.

"I won't let go," he promised. He lowered himself carefully to his knees, and Scully joined him, grabbing a washcloth from the rack above the toilet. He was holding Hannah above the water, and she checked the temperature one more time before she pressed down on her feet, urging Mulder to let them dip into the water. Hannah jerked in Mulder's hands at the contact and she held onto Hannah's legs while he wrapped his arms around her more securely. 

"You just need to hold her head up, Mulder," she whispered, turning the warm water up a bit more. 

Hannah was restless in the water, arms and legs moving. Scully smoothed the lapping water up and over Hannah's torso as she began to cry thinly, barely conscious. Her voice echoed up and around them, the fretful wailing bouncing off the tiled walls and mixing with Mulder's murmured words as he tried to soothe the child. The string of his murmuring was mostly nonsensical, alternating between hushing and soothing Hannah, his voice strained but quiet. As the bath went on and Hannah's tears continued, Scully realized that Mulder was crying as well, but his utterances had transformed into a mantra that he whispered to Hannah over and over. "You're OK, we're going to make it better. I promise."

She looked up at him in surprise, and his tear-filled gaze caught hers, hot and challenging, as if daring her to contradict him. His rolled-up shirt sleeves were soaked, and he was rocking Hannah in his left arm, dribbling water over her head like a baptism with his right hand. 

"Just lay her back, Mulder," she whispered. Hannah started to shift in Mulder's grasp as he did so, and she leaned over to catch Hannah's face so that she wouldn't turn it into the water. They were pressed against each other and the side of the tub, and she raised her eyes to find him still staring at her, tears streaming down his face. She had witnessed Mulder's tears more than once over the course of their years together, and had always been surprised by the artless and raw manner in which he cried, as if he were still a boy. Like most adults, she'd learned to feel shame at such a display; as a consequence, her own tears were repressed more often than not. When they did finally overflow, they did so against her will and every effort, in a silent stream that rebuked her lack of control. But tonight, Mulder's quiet tears mirrored her own unshed ones. 

Unlike her, he made no effort to check them as their eyes caught and held. The intensity of his gaze threatened to melt the stone of ice cold fear behind which her tears were dammed, but for once she gave no thought to the display that might occur if that happened. Instead, she was overwhelmed with feeling. She loved him impossibly at that particular moment, could not think of any man other than Mulder who would stand by her so steadfastly through nightmare after nightmare, who would love her child, misbegotten as she had been, so easily and completely. She raised her left hand to wipe the tears that he was crying for all of them off his face, forgetting that it was already sodden and useless for such a purpose.

He lifted her hand from his face and placed a kiss on the wrinkled tips of her fingers silently, never breaking her gaze. The rings that she had somehow never taken off since he'd given them to her days ago glittered in the unforgiving light of the bathroom.

She closed her eyes as he leant forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead, sending a prayer heavenward as she did so. God help her, but she wanted to believe his promise.

~*~

Her first sight of the office park that was supposed to hold Hannah's salvation did not seem promising. She knew that any place would seem ominous to her in the winter dark, but the anonymous tree-lined roads that led them deeper and deeper into a maze of squat pseudo-industrial buildings looked nothing like a place where a desperately ill child could get competent medical assistance. In the driver's seat, Mulder fidgeted as he followed Frohike's directions. She could hear an occasional word from the phone as Mulder questioned whether or not this was the right place. It was far larger than she'd expected. They'd already passed a UPS facility, and several office supply businesses of one sort or another -- companies for machines, paper, even furniture. They'd passed a medical records company a while back, but Frohike had insisted that it wasn't the right place. She sighed and tried to relax, looking back at a dozing Hannah, and smoothing down her last passable skirt nervously. 

She'd slept lightly for the scant time after Hannah's bath, and had risen from her uneasy rest when she felt Mulder get up from the bed and pad into the bathroom. Hannah'd slept between them for those few hours, the sounds of her breathing devolving into wheezing and weak coughs that threatened to become more overpowering the longer she went untreated.

By the time Mulder had exited the bathroom in a swirl of humid air, she'd salvaged an outfit from her one remaining skirt and the new sweater set she'd purchased days before. She'd showered and dressed swiftly, and they'd left the room just after six o'clock to set out for this bleak destination, only rousing Hannah enough to dress her warmly. Mulder had carried Hannah out to the car, and tucked her tenderly into her carseat while Scully stood on the threshold of their room and watched, filled with anxiety. The dark morning seemed foreboding to her, despite the bright light of the winter constellations against the clear, pre-dawn sky. She was a winter's child herself, but that fact gave her daughters no inoculation. Emily had died just as winter began. What chance did Hannah have when winter held the world in such a harsh and unforgiving grip?

The car fishtailed as Mulder turned yet another corner and he swore, letting go of the wheel so the car would straighten itself out. In the confusion, she almost missed the anonymous structure that had suddenly appeared on their right. She just made out the word Prometheus on a sign mostly buried in a snowbank and sucked in her breath. 

"Mul—" He cut her off before she finished. 

"Got it, Frohike," he said. He braked sharply to turn into the mostly deserted parking lot. A few white panel vans sat in neatly plowed spaces, their roofs capped with snow. On the other side of the lot, near the blank eye of the front door, the lumps of what looked to be sedan cars were visible under the snow. A Bobcat stood next to the cars silently, snow still in the bucket to be moved elsewhere. 

"Think we're expected, Scully?" Mulder asked. He dropped the now silent phone into an empty cupholder, and pulled out his gun as he maneuvered their rental into a parking space not directly in line of the front door. She had taken hers out as soon as he'd turned the corner into the parking lot. "What's the plan, Mulder?" she asked. 

He put the car in park, but didn't cut the engine. "Get behind the wheel, Scully, would you?"

He lifted up and stepped over while she slid underneath him, as he moved to the passenger side. She rammed the seat closer to the wheel, using her left hand. 

"I'm going to ring the bell," he said grimly, trying desperately to keep his knees from being wedged against the dashboard as he waited for her to hastily adjust the mirrors. "Shoot anyone who approaches the car." He turned around and looked at Hannah, dozing in her carseat, and then turned back to her with a smile. "Try not to shoot me, though, OK?" 

"Mulder," she said, protesting faintly. 

"I really didn't enjoy it the last time," he continued. The long fingers of his left hand circled her wrist loosely for a second, and then he opened the car door and stepped out into the cold air. She took the safety off her gun and watched him go, scanning the parking lot and building roofline for signs of life. There were no windows cut into the blank façade of Prometheus Strategies Inc, just a small one in the door that Mulder was walking toward. The left front of the building was dominated by a loading dock, the three large doors pulled closed against the weather. It looked like they'd been unused in a while, as the snow had drifted across the empty expanse of the dock ledge and piled against the grated doors. 

Hannah coughed in the back seat, and Scully startled at the sound, turning her head to ensure that Hannah was OK and that there was no one behind them.

When she turned back, Mulder was at the door, leaning on the bell without letting up. She put the car into drive, but kept her foot planted on the brake, leaving her left hand on the wheel. Mulder had his ear pressed to the door, listening, and she tensed as she saw him move away from it and flatten himself against the building. As the door opened, he ducked and came up low. She forced herself to look around her and Hannah, although she wanted to back the car up and over to see what was going on. She could see Mulder's mouth moving, but the tension in his stance did not ease as he waited for a response. As the seconds ticked by, she scanned the mirrors and all visible sightlines, feeling exposed and vulnerable and utterly incapable of keeping all three of them safe. 

When Mulder shifted his posture, she swung her gun up and out toward him. He took a step backward into the parking lot and the door swung open all the way to reveal a slender young man with auburn hair. He was wearing a lab coat and looked curiously over to where she sat in the car. Despite the time that had passed since their last encounter with him, his youthful appearance was unchanged. As she looked on in surprise, the young man stepped out onto the snow-covered asphalt and walked directly over to her car, Mulder trailing behind with his gun. He stopped and bent over to peer in the passenger window at her, his expression not changing at the sight of her own drawn gun. Instead, he looked right past the weapon to her face, and she realized with a start that she, and not Hannah, was the object of his curiousity.

"Agent Scully," Kurt Crawford said in a mild voice, "welcome to Prometheus. Please come inside."

She sucked in a gasp of surprise, hating the tremble of the weapon in her grasp. She swung it at the sound of someone trying to open the locked back door, but saw Mulder, gun nowhere in evidence, trying to get to Hannah. "Scully," he said to her through the window, "open up." 

She stared at him for a long moment through the glass that separated them and wondered how many unimagined questions would be answered on this journey. She wasn't at all sure she wanted to know the answers.

"Scully," Mulder pled, watching her through the glass. "Get the files." 

"Agent Scully," Crawford said a beat later, repeating himself, "please come inside." 

~*~

The reception area of Prometheus was small, clean and looked utterly unused. It looked like a set rather than an actual workplace, with its neat guest chairs and coffee table complete with carefully fanned magazines. Behind the empty reception desk, a door stood open and she followed Kurt Crawford and Mulder through it, starting when it closed behind her. She turned, only to come face-to-face with Kurt Crawford, again. 

"Agent Scully!" the young man said, in a tone of subdued surprise, even though his face was still relatively affectless. She heard a ripple of voices repeat her name in exactly the same tone and turned back to see that Mulder and the first Kurt Crawford were farther down the long hall than she. In the intervening space, she could see several more Kurt Crawfords at the doors of rooms that opened off the halls. All of them were staring at her with identical expressions of curiousity. 

"Scully," Mulder's voice urged her to him, and she grasped for it like a lifeline, hurrying down the hall after murmuring something that might have sounded like hello and excuse me. A ripple of sound, a whispering of Mulder's name, followed her as she moved down the corridor.

"There are a number of us here," the first Kurt Crawford said to her. 

"I see," Scully said, although she did not understand at all.

"We have a lot of work to accomplish," he continued in his matter of fact voice.

As they continued down the hall, she saw the green water filled tanks in one room and shivered. Most of the rooms they passed seemed to be fully operational labs, although their passage in the corridor drew the identical occupants away from their benches and hoods to peer at them. 

At the end of the corridor, they came to yet another door. "This is our infirmary," Kurt said. A clone could be seen through a window, turning on monitors and readying a bed. "Please put her on the bed, Agent Mulder."

"Hannah," Mulder said shortly as he moved through the door. "Her name is Hannah."

Kurt nodded, "Yes, so you said. For H in the series." He turned to Scully, "Do you have the data?"

Scully stared at him for longer than was polite, looking at his features and trying to comprehend their alien familiarity. 

"Scully?" Mulder asked, "did you leave the bag in the car?" 

She nodded, and tore her eyes away from the clone's imperturbable gaze to Mulder's troubled one. "I'm sorry, Mulder," she said, "I just …"

He nodded, and held out his hands for the keys. "I'll go get it," he said, "you tell him what's been happening."

Before she could open her mouth to protest further, he was moving back the way they'd come, and she was left alone with a pair of the Crawford clones. 

"Could you please describe the presenting symptoms?" The clone at Hannah's bedside asked her. 

Scully tore her eyes away from the first clone to find herself regarding the second. He had put a pulse oxygen monitor on Hannah's finger and was checking her vital signs. Hannah had a digital thermometer in her mouth, and was lying atop the bedclothes, still wearing her boots, overcoat, hat and one mitten. Although she had submitted to the clone's ministrations easily enough, she looked faintly terrified of the whole situation. Scully shook herself out of her reverie, and sat next to Hannah on the bed. She took the thermometer out of Hannah's mouth and handed it back to the clone for the moment, then removed Hannah's hat and mittens, and held her hand as she spoke. 

"Agent Mulder found Hannah approximately six days ago …" she began, only to be interrupted by the first clone, who was now holding a clip board and a pen. 

"Yes, we know," he said implacably, "but we don't know when or how she began to decompensate."

Scully closed her eyes and tried to gather her thoughts. "More than 60 hours ago, Hannah began to exhibit signs of illness, primarily fever, rapid pulse and listlessness. Her fever has ranged from a high of 104.5 to a low of 99.4, but it has not dropped below 101 at any time for the last 24 hours. In the past 24 hours, she has developed a deep cough. Her temperature spiked to 104.5 approximately eight hours ago, despite the fact that she has been receiving a weight appropriate dose of ibuprofen for the past 48 hours."

Mulder burst into the room with the discs just as she finished.

"Mulder!" Hannah said. She sounded relieved, and Scully tamped down the momentary pang of jealousy that flared. 

"Hi pumpkin," he said warmly. "How're you feeling?"

"OK," she croaked, and then began coughing. Scully adjusted the head of the bed to a higher position and asked one of the clones to get her some water.

"Is your throat sore, Hannah?" Scully asked. 

"I guess so," she said. "It hurts."

"How about your chest?" Scully asked her. "Does that hurt?" 

"When I cough," Hannah answered wheezily. 

Scully gave her some water to sip, and continued to divest Hannah of her outerwear. 

When she was under the covers in her nightgown, the clone gave her back the thermometer. "Put this under your tongue, Pumpkin," he said to Hannah in his nearly affectless voice. 

Scully could feel her eyebrows rising in surprise at the clone's attempt at bedside manner. Behind her, she could hear a strangled rumble from Mulder as he choked back a laugh and tried to speak at the same time. 

It was Hannah, however, who said to the clone gravely, "You should call me Hannah," with particular emphasis on the first word. Her tone was polite, but brooked no argument. 

The clone, seemingly not in the least offended, nodded and reminded her to place the thermometer under her tongue. Mulder stood behind him and watched the numbers on the screen as they rose. 

"103.5," he said to Scully before the clone could. "It was 104.5 early this morning."

"So Agent Scully reported," the first clone said. "I think that our best course of action would be to take some blood and other samples and see if there is any bacterial growth. Until then, however, I'd suggest that we rehydrate and begin a course of a broad-spectrum antibiotic such as amoxicillin or cephalosporin. What is your opinion, Agent Scully?"

"I concur," she said. "Hannah's fever has been elevated for too long, and she does have some inflammation of the lymph glands under her jaw. However, I'm concerned that amoxicillin might be too much of an allergen risk."

The first clone nodded to his counterpart, who exited the room. "Was there any indication of allergy in these records, Agent Scully?"

"None that I can decipher, but it can't hurt to be safe," she answered. "There were codes and abbreviations with which I'm not familiar. Perhaps you could decode some of them?"

"Perhaps," he answered smoothly. "Let me take a preliminary look at the records. In light of the lack of information, I agree that it is advisable to try cephalosporin first."

Scully nodded her agreement.

"Would you be comfortable taking the swabs and the blood samples?" 

"Yes," she answered immediately. Although in truth it had been years since she'd done either, she wasn't about to let one of the clones test Hannah. 

"I'll be in the lab across the hall looking at this data," the first clone answered. "You can bring the samples there when you're ready." He left the room, and Scully stood and took off her own overcoat, looking for the sink to wash her hands. She could hear the low rumble of Mulder's voice as he talked to Hannah, asking her how she felt and if she wanted to watch some TV. She tucked her rings carefully into the waistband of her skirt before she washed, and then gloved, her hands.

The clone who seemed to work at the infirmary had returned in the meantime, and was hanging an IV bag for rehydration, as well as the smaller bag of cephalosporin. Scully returned to Hannah's bedside and asked Hannah if she understood what Scully was going to do. 

"You're going to stick me with that needle," Hannah said matter of factly, "and then tape it down so the stuff in the bag runs into me."

"So you've had IVs before?" Scully asked.

"Yes," Hannah said. "How long will it hurt me?" Her tone was stoic; Mulder was visibly startled and sat down on the bed, watching her closely. 

"I'll try my best not to hurt you when I put the needle in, Hannah," Scully answered. Her already shaky confidence in this whole procedure was undermined by this evidence of Hannah's negative past experiences. "Do you have any numbing agent?" She asked the infirmary clone. 

His brow drew down in concentration. "I believe there is some lidocaine gel in the formulary."

"Please go get it," Scully said firmly. She turned back to Hannah. "I'm going to numb your skin so the needle won't hurt when it goes in," she said to her.

Hannah looked very puzzled. "The needle doesn't bother me when it goes in," she said. "The stuff that goes inside me hurts."

Scully regarded her with a dawning dread. "Did it look like this?" She pulled the rehydrating solution off the IV pole.

"No," Hannah said, looking at the bag. "Not the stuff that hurt. It was black." 

Mulder looked like he might be sick, and she knew how he felt. She had a sharp, physical memory of the feel of the black oil writhing in her veins, corrupting her. She struggled to keep her expression neutral as she addressed Hannah. "I will never put anything inside of you to hurt you, Hannah," she promised. "Never. This medicine will make you feel better, not worse."

"OK," Hannah said. She seemed pleased, but puzzled, which made Scully feel even more sad. It was clear that she had no expectation of being cared for in this kind of setting, and Scully found herself at a loss for words to explain it any clearer. She appealed to Mulder silently to help her, their eyes locking across Hannah's bed. 

"Hannah, doctors are supposed to help people," Mulder said quietly, "not hurt them. The people that had you before were not good doctors."

Hannah contemplated this explanation while Scully accepted the numbing agent from the clone and smoothed it on Hannah's arm. She quietly instructed the clone to heat a blanket in the microwave while she watched Hannah.

"So that's why Heather and Hilary and Hope went away?" she asked. "Because the bad doctors didn't help them?"

Scully could not help fisting her hands in their gloves, and only hoped that her nails would not pierce them where they pressed into her palms. 

Mulder was stricken by Hannah's words, but his mild expression did not change as he smoothed Hannah's hair from her face. "Yes," he said succinctly. He swallowed several times. "Were they very sick?"

"They cried a lot," Hannah said matter of factly. "It made my head hurt worse, so I would try to go back to sleep. I don't really remember it. I woke up and they were gone. I think Hope left first."

"Did you see her leave, honey?" Scully asked, wrapping Hannah's arm in the blanket. 

Mulder shifted position so that he was sitting next to Hannah with his back to her pillows. He wrapped his arms around the child. 

"No," Hannah said, watching what Scully was doing intently. "When I woke up, she was gone. And then I hurt some more, and then Hilary was gone."

"You were very sick," Scully whispered, still holding the warm blanket around Hannah's arm. She had never quite understood the murderous impulse as viscerally as she did at this moment.

"I thought you said I was sick now," Hannah said, confused. "It doesn't feel the same at all." 

Scully reached up and touched Hannah's face, "I'm glad," she said. "Hannah, I want you to listen to me. I won't let anybody hurt you ever again."

"Oh," Hannah said. She looked at Scully with an expression of wonder. "You won't?" 

"No," Scully said firmly, choking back her tears. Mulder was resting his head on Hannah's smaller one and she could see his chest heave as he tried to repress his own emotions. He was smiling at her, despite his trembling chin, as she caressed Hannah's cheek and shook her head, looking directly into Hannah's wide eyes. "Never."

"Oh!" Hannah said. She reached up and took hold of Scully's hand, hugging her arm to her chest. "OK," she said brightly. 

~*~

When Hannah was settled in her bed watching cartoons with Mulder, Scully washed her hands again and returned her rings to their place. She smoothed her hair in the mirror and was not surprised to find Mulder regarding her with an expression so full of emotion that she'd need a year just to catalogue all the shades of it. What was clear was how very proud he was of her. She turned, and leant against the sink, gazing back at him. He pressed a kiss to Hannah's head and she nodded, picking up the tray that held blood and sputum to be cultured.

"I'll be back," she said to them both. 

Hannah was glassy-eyed and mesmerized by the TV, but Mulder nodded. "We'll be here," he said. 

She crossed the now quiet hallway without encountering any more of the Kurt Crawford clones, hesitating slightly as she crossed the threshold of the lab. What was it that they were working on here? She had her suspicions, but she wasn't sure if they were reflective of anything other than her own hope. At the far end of the long lab space, she could see several clones working silently. She moved into the room. 

"Agent Scully?" 

She turned and found the Kurt Crawford that had escorted them into the complex rising from a desk. She was grateful that although they were wearing lab coats, they were not wearing identical outfits. This Kurt Crawford appeared to be reading the disks that she and Mulder had brought. "Mr. Crawford," she answered.

"Please just call me Kurt," he said. 

She nodded. "Do I address all of you as Kurt?" 

"Yes," he said succinctly. "I'm sure it's very confusing to you, but we all know ourselves as Kurt." 

"All right," she answered. "May I ask what you've learned from the data that Agent Mulder and I brought you?"

"Certainly," Kurt answered, "if you'll just accompany me to this hood so I can get these cultures growing, I'll be happy to answer your questions."

The curiousity overcame Scully at that point. "What exactly is it that you do here at Prometheus?"

"We look for answers," Kurt said. "Ways to help the humans."

"Hence the name," Scully said. 

"Yes."

"Are you trying to create a vaccine?" 

"Yes." 

"So you need to make more alien-human hybrids to help you do that."

"No," Kurt said. "We don't make more. We just recreate ourselves." 

"I'm not sure I understand the distinction," Scully said.

"There once was a Kurt Crawford," he answered. "Our original self."

"And he was taken," she answered, thinking of Samantha … and herself.

"He was given," Kurt answered. "as many others were given, by the senior members of the project. It was 1973; he was 10 years of age."

Scully could not school her expression fast enough to mask her distaste. 

"You have met his maternal grandfather, I believe," Kurt continued, as if he had not seen. "He was an older gentleman, a British national."

Scully stared at Kurt for a long moment, seeing his features reassemble themselves in light of this news. "Yes," she said, "I met him at Agent Mulder's father's funeral, and …" she hesitated, not sure how much more she should reveal.

"And later, he gave Agent Mulder a version of the vaccine to give to you. We worked on that vaccine."

"Thank you," Scully answered.

"There were many of us involved in the necessary work," the clone said mildly.

"Nonetheless," Scully countered, "we're having this conversation because of that work."

"Without Agent Mulder finding you and administering the vaccine, this conversation would not be taking place," the clone rejoined.

"And as I've already thanked him for his effort, it's only appropriate that I thank you for yours," Scully volleyed back, and then changed the subject. "Have you refined the vaccine since then?"

"We are trying to create a preventative vaccine," Kurt offered. "The vaccine you received is little more than a fail-safe we have used to protect collaborative humans in the very early stages of infection."

She considered this statement. "You do not use it to protect yourselves?" 

"We are expendable," the clone answered. "We occupy short lifespans and are easily re-created. Since we document what we've done meticulously, the learning curve for our new selves is relatively short."

"I'm sorry," Scully said, "but that seems completely barbaric to me."

"It is our choice," the clone answered. "In any case, the failsafe vaccine is ineffective for our altered physiology, and we have deemed it an inefficient use of our resources to spend time trying to protect ourselves. Besides, our short lifespan ensures that we would not be the target of colonization efforts, as it would have a negative effect on the health of the colonizing parasite."

Scully blanched at the notion of parasites but ignored it for the time being to return to a previous statement for her next question. "You say that you have made these choices freely, yet when Mulder met some of your predecessors, they were working for Dr. Scanlon."

"Yes," the clone answered, "although things were not perhaps exactly as they seemed." He closed the hood and removed the samples to another bench to grow. 

She remained silent, hoping that the clone would continue.

"We have had to participate in experiments sanctioned by the main project in order to reproduce ourselves in great enough numbers so that we may do the work that we deem important. It has allowed us to gain access to necessary materials, knowledge and funding." He paused. "We do not trust other clones to participate in what we're trying to do, hence the necessity for secrecy. Our brothers are now a vast network. We collaborate, but we have sabotaged as well. We do what is necessary for the greater good of humanity." The clone spoke earnestly, but still without a pronounced affect.

Scully crossed her arms across her torso and rocked back and forth before she asked her next question. "Did you participate in the experiments that created Hannah?"

"No," he answered succinctly, then explained further when he saw that she wanted more information. "Dr. Scanlon has not allowed us near his projects since Agent Mulder first met some of us in Allentown. In his view, we are a corrupted line. Our original self's grandfather was able to convince the overseers of the project that the Kurt Crawford Agent Mulder met had been seduced by his ideas. Our work on the vaccine was too valuable to be abandoned, so we were not terminated as a line."

"What about the project that produced Emily?"

"Work that our forebears did on refining cloning methodologies was used in the formulation of the Emily line," the clone said, "but we were not directly involved."

"The Emily line?" Scully asked.

"The child that you met was not the only one," the clone said. "The typical presentation is groups of four. Mutations slip in when larger batches are created using the same materials."

"So Emily was a clone?" Scully felt quite nauseated by this conversation, but she wanted to continue it.

"Yes. She was essentially your clone." 

"Essentially?"

"She was produced through a somatic cell nuclear transfer. Egg fusion was used but the nucleus of one of your ova was altered with alien material. However, it caused irrevocable damage to the genome, specifically the lymphatic system."

"And the purpose of this alteration was an attempt to make resistant alien human hybrids?"

"That has been the general purpose of the reproductive experiments for the past fifteen years."

Scully caught his distinction. "And what were the other purposes?" 

The clone looked around the room where other Kurt Crawfords were working. "There was also the need to create a workforce."

'Drones,' Scully thought sadly. She was just opening her mouth to ask another question, when an alarm on the clone's watchband sounded, and was echoed elsewhere in the room. She looked down the end of the long room to see that most of the clones that had been there earlier were now gone.

"Agent Scully, we have a status meeting at this time," he said. "I can bring you data on what we know occurred as part of the reproductive experiments so far. As I said, we've not been involved in any way in the project of which the child in question is the result. Data on that project needs to be gleaned from the disk."

He began moving her toward the door. "You're free to look around the facility. I believe that breakfast has been brought into the child's room."

She stopped him in the corridor with a hand on his arm, looking over her shoulder to make sure that they were alone. "Just one more question, Kurt," she said firmly. "What happened to the original Kurt Crawford, the boy who was given to the project?"

For the first time, the clone seemed surprised at her question. "He did not survive the experimental process," he said simply, and almost as if he thought it a very silly question. "We have documentation of the process he underwent. It was more than twenty-five years ago -- the methodology was far more crude. The idea of parthenogenetic experimentation was in its infancy, as it were."

"I see," Scully said, forcing an air of calmness that she most certainly did not feel. "What about the other children who were given to the project?"

Kurt regarded her with drawn down brows. "I'm not sure what your question is."

"Did any of the other children that were given to the project survive?" she asked quietly. 

"No," Kurt answered. "None of those given survived in their original form. I'm afraid that any others you have met were clones like myself, although some may have not realized it."

"I see," Scully said, in a whisper. God help her, she needed clarification. "So, Samantha Mulder?" She could not finish the question, but stared at the clone hoping he would answer her ellipsis nonetheless.

"Her original self expired in 1975," Kurt answered. "I can have that data brought to you as well."

Scully nodded. "Not today," she said in a ragged voice. "And please do not give that data to Agent Mulder."

"As you wish," the clone answered. "I really must go."

Scully nodded and watched blindly as the clone hurried down the hall. All these years, all this time, all the death and the suffering … this was the outcome she had always feared would come to pass, but being right about it gave her no satisfaction at all. 

She had never had to look someone in the eye and break their heart before, not even a previous lover. In their work, it was usually Mulder who broke the bad news to the parents whose child had died; it had only been her responsibility once or twice, and it wasn't quite the same thing. She'd never loved any of those people, past lovers included, the way she loved Mulder.

She'd ached for the pain of bereft parents in a different way in the year since Emily, but this … she'd bleed for Mulder. For the first time, she felt the tiniest spark of empathy for Mulder's decision not to tell her about her ova because the desire to protect him from such sorrow was so overwhelming. But she knew it was not a secret that she could keep for long. Not now. 

She turned and walked quietly to the door of Hannah's room, and then had to stop to hide the smile behind her hand, even as a tear spilled over her lower lid. Mulder and Hannah were both asleep on Hannah's bed, the television blaring uselessly above them, their breakfast trays untouched. She wiped away her tears and walked into Hannah's room. She found the spare blanket that she'd used to warm Hannah's arm and covered Mulder with it, then walked around the bed to look at her daughter's beautiful face. She thought again of the men who'd created this project -- of the sacrifices they had made of their children, both the given and the left behind, their wives, her own life. She pondered the enormity of what they had done and wondered how these things could ever have resembled choices worth making, how they had become reasonable decisions. 

She sat down next to the bed and covered Hannah's hand with her own, feeling the warmth of her, the life in her. However she had come to be, this was her child. She could never give her up to a life of terror and pain. She would die first. She laid her head down upon Hannah's lap. She would kill them both first. 

But before she did, she would take as many as possible of those who would force her to make such a horrendous decision with her, to Hell.

~*~ 

Dana Scully rotated her neck gingerly as she sat in the chair next to Hannah's bed. She'd fallen asleep with her head in Hannah's lap, and only awoken hours later when Mulder tried to move her so that Hannah could use the bathroom. Her neck had been bothering her ever since, and the data that she was reading did nothing to ease her discomfort, or improve her dark mood. 

As promised, the records of the how of Emily's creation had been provided for her. Mulder had pointed them out to her when she sat up, but firmly insisted that she eat some lunch before she dove into them. His concern for her led her to believe that he knew exactly what was in the files, although much of the documentation was highly technical. After her late lunch, Mulder had gone off to explore the facility while Hannah dozed again in the high hospital bed. She would have been more concerned about Hannah's continued sleepiness if not for the fact that her temperature had dropped as well, an apparent good response to the administration of the antibiotics. Her oxygen saturation was still slightly lower at 96% than what Scully would like, but the rails of Hannah's coughing had not seemed to deepen, either. Scully hoped that the administration of the cephalosporin had come at the appropriate time, and that maybe the grip of Hannah's infection had been broken.

She stood and placed the files on the bedside tray table and then stretched, working the kinks out from her head down to her toes. She'd have given anything to take her shoes off and really stretch, but she wasn't trusting her bare feet on the floors of any kind of medical facility. She was moving her head from side to side when she heard a calm voice ask, "Agent Scully?"

"Kurt," she said, opening her eyes in surprise. It was far too soon for any kind of results from Hannah's tests. "Is everything all right?"

"I believe so," he answered evenly. "I've had a chance to go through more of the data that you brought, and …"

"Let's step outside," she ushered the clone away from Hannah's bedside. "I'd like Hannah to have some uninterrupted rest."

The clone glanced up at the wall clock. "I believe that she'll be served dinner with the first group in thirty-five minutes."

"I'd like her to rest as much as possible, nonetheless," Scully countered, and then gave into her curiousity. "Who cooks for you?"

"We do," Kurt answered, and once again Scully got the feeling he was amused by her question. "We rotate responsibility for feeding ourselves. Food supplies are ordered via the internet and delivered to the building. It's relatively easy for us to avoid outside contact." 

She nodded, thinking how sad and isolated their lives seemed to her. "Thank you for taking care of us."

"We couldn't do anything other than that," the clone said easily.

She tilted her head to one side, considering her next question. "Because Agent Mulder and I are part of this project?" 

The clone blinked. "I suppose one could view it from that perspective," he said, "but we've always considered that we are on the same side as you and Agent Mulder. That consideration obligates us." 

Scully wondered who exactly had instilled this sense of duty and ethics within these clones. How much, really, was due to influence and how much to the nature of the original Kurt Crawford who'd never been allowed to become the man standing in front of her? If the clone noticed anything odd about her continued silence, he did not say so, just stood there quietly while she pondered. 

"Scully?" Mulder's voice as he walked up the hallway was wary.

"Is everything all right?" she asked for the second time in a few minutes.

"That was going to be my question," he asked her. She looked at Mulder as he stood in the hallway watching her with a searching gaze. He'd removed his suitcoat, and rolled up his sleeves, as if this were any other workday, exploring in this warehouse of oddities. He seemed tense and discomposed, and she wondered fleetingly if he'd asked the clones about his sister. 

"I'm fine," she answered, and hurried to continue on with her thoughts when Mulder's hazel eyes had darkened at her use of the phrase. "I'm trying to comprehend some things, Mulder."

He observed her for a few seconds, hands on his hips, examining her face for any hint of a lie. "OK," he said. His shoulders relaxed fractionally. "How's the pumpkin?" he asked with real concern.

"Dozey," Scully said, "but she's not coughing as much, and her fever keeps going down, bit by bit."

Mulder sighed in relief. "I'll go sit with her, then." His statement was more of a question directed at her, but she nodded.

"I'll be a while," she added.

She and Kurt moved away from the center of the hallway to the lab doorway opposite the infirmary as Mulder turned into Hannah's room, giving her one last searching gaze over his shoulder. 

"What did you learn about Hannah?" Scully asked the clone.

"As I suspected, she is one of the 'H' series of experiments that used your ova."

Scully nodded, but felt no surprise at his confirmation. Instead, she asked the question to which she dreaded to hear the answer. "Which would mean that there are series of experiments of which I've been unaware," she said evenly. "A through D, F & G …" she paused. "Are there other series currently being conducted?"

"The A through D series were unsuccessful," Kurt said. "They were part of an earlier attempt to clone individuals who might prove disruptive to the Project's general mission. Those clone lines were susceptible to the same kind of problems that befell the original Dolly project, however."

Scully's eyebrows were at her hairline. "They were trying to clone me?" she asked incredulously. Her hand unconsciously went to the back of her neck, "To replace me," she said. 

"Yes," Kurt said, "and the cloning process employed the same rapid aging technology that had been utilized successfully in the amplification of our original self, as well as others. However, the older the original self …"

"The more rapidly the clone degraded," Scully mused. "This is incredible science that you're talking about."

"Not to those of us involved in this project," he answered. "However, the limitations of that kind of parthenogenetic reproduction were not yet evident to those running those experiments." 

"So, Emily?" she asked, beginning to think she knew the answer.

"When they realized that replacement was not going to be an option, they reverted to using your genetic material in the same way that other female abductees' ova were being used." Kurt paused. "Dr. Scanlon was in charge of the projects from E onward."

Scully nodded. "And how far into the alphabet has he gone?"

Kurt looked puzzled by her question. "H," he said. 

She didn't even attempt to hide her surprise. "Why did he stop at H?"

Kurt really did seem confused by her question. 

"Kurt?" she prompted.

"I'm very sorry, Agent Scully, but I assumed that you knew more of this information. To the best of our knowledge, no planned project using your ova has gone forward since you discovered the E line in San Diego. In fact, initial work on planned experiments I through L was discarded."

"Because I found out?" Scully could not imagine that the answer was so simple.

"No," the clone said slowly, "because of Agent Mulder." 

"What?" For a moment, she was filled with a burning rage. If there was more that Fox Mulder had kept from her she would … but then she remembered her own discovery about Samantha earlier in the day, and the rage was replaced with fear. "Why?"

"When Agent Mulder went to Dr. Calderon to demand answers, he was extremely forceful."

She was sure that her mouth was hanging open. "Forceful?"

"Extremely," the clone said, with no sense of irony. "He not only physically assaulted Dr. Calderon, but he destroyed his office. Later, he destroyed experiments associated with your ova at another facility."

"Fox Mulder?" She said to the clone. Of course, she knew that he had a temper, and a highly honed sense of protectiveness, but she had never seen him use raw physical force as a weapon –- he was far more likely to wield his intellect than his fists.

"Yes," Kurt said implacably, "and when Dr. Calderon ended up dead, many labs affiliated with the project refused to have anything to do with your ova."

She was reduced to stuttering again.

"In fact, most labs destroyed your ova."

"Most," she said, hoarsely. 

"Yes," he said, "and then, of course, his recent physical assault on Dr. Scanlon at the now defunct Norfolk facility just cemented the opinion that using your ova was far too dangerous. Project researchers believe that if they're using your ova, Agent Mulder will find out and come after them."

"I see," she said faintly. "He did tell me that he'd recently seen Dr. Scanlon."

"Well, when he saw him, he beat him quite severely," the clone said. "It took a number of project security guards and a taser to get him off Dr. Scanlon."

"A number of security guards?" she repeated. She was still not sure that they were talking about the same man. It was unfathomable. Perhaps a shapeshifter had impersonated him –- but that would not explain his bruised hands from last week. She shook her head in wonder. She knew that Mulder was capable of a certain level of violence, that like all agents he had been trained to react and to fight, but this … she had never imagined that Mulder would behave in such a way.

"And a taser," the clone said. "The rumor is that all of your ova have been destroyed."

"All of them?" she asked. "Are you sure?"

"We're trying to find out definitively, but the rumor is that they were all destroyed, over Dr. Scanlon's strenuous objections."

She opened her dry mouth. "So Dr. Scanlon isn't afraid of Mulder?"

"I have no way of knowing that," Kurt said thoughtfully. "Historically, Dr. Scanlon has argued that your responsiveness to the vaccine when you were exposed to the black oil during your first abduction made your genetic material valuable for immunological experimentation. However, since the other scientists on the project do not like to be beaten, it appears his argument has been nullified."

"I was exposed to the black oil when I was abducted in 1994?"

"Actually, both times you were abducted," the clone said succinctly.

She turned and walked around the hallway with her hand on her aching head, thinking furiously. "I was not expected to survive," she posited, but the clone did not respond, until another thought occurred to her. "The virus is why my DNA was branched," she said.

"Yes," the clone answered. "You're one of the few abductees who've been infected with more than one variant of the virus and responded to the treatments in both cases."

"Which variants?" 

"Like Agent Mulder, you were infected with the Tunguska variant and received the so-called Russian vaccine. The variant that you received from the Africanized honeybee was a sub-variant that's been altered for ease of delivery."

"And you have a vaccine for that variant?" she asked, dizzily.

"As I said earlier, not as a reliable preventative, no," the clone answered. "When we have tried to vaccinate prophylactically, the subject would invariably become infected and resistant to further intervention. We have theories about why this is occurring, and actually, would be very grateful if you'd give us your perspective."

"I …" she held up her hand, "forgive me, but I'm very far behind you on this learning curve. Are you telling me that Mulder and I are both immune to the black oil virus?"

"Most likely, in your case," the clone answered. "Agent Mulder is a different order of magnitude as far as immunity is concerned. He alone has resisted every variant that he's been infected with. He has even survived infection when no treatment was offered."

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "I thought Mulder was only infected in Russia."

"Agent Mulder was first infected in childhood."

She remembered a changed file folder label in the bowels of a coal mine in Virginia. "I'd like to see those records, please." She took a deep breath and turned to see the clone moving into the lab. "Kurt, not at this moment. I'd like to go back to our previous conversation."

"Of course," the clone said. 

"Emily was created using some variant of somatic cell nuclear transfer, correct?" 

The clone nodded. "Yes. Although both ova were yours, the nucleus of one ovum was altered with alien DNA."

She continued, "With the failure of the earlier cloning attempts, why persist in using an almost parthenogenetic process? My cell line was obviously older, and there were males abducted by the project, both children and adult. Why not use a more conventional reproductive methodology to start the process of fertilized cell division?" 

"The aliens reproduce asexually, which is what they were trying to replicate."

"The aliens reproduce asexually," Scully murmured aloud. "Oh my God. So, the original experimenters thought that they could alter our genome to reproduce asexually?"

"Not exactly," the clone said serenely, "the hypothesis was that creation of a successfully resistant human/alien hybrid would probably require cloning to mimic the asexual reproductive process of the aliens. Ultimately, they hoped this hybrid line of humans would breed, creating a resistant population via sexual reproduction."

She started to interrupt the clone, but he anticipated her question. "Yes, most of the cloned lines were functionally sterile, which was problematic, but negligible considering the high rate of mortality, short lifespans and general instability of the recombination. In addition, there were too many offshoot experiments that came out of those experiments, which severely undercut the focus necessary for perfecting the cloning process."

"Such as?"

"The notion of creating adult replicants such as the A through D series that utilized your ova is one example. That scheme itself was born from the founders' desire to replicate resistant versions of themselves that could survive colonization. They were, after all, more than middle-aged in most cases."

She nodded, but did not comment. The selfishness of the men that Kurt referred to as the founders was no longer surprising, even though it was still staggering in its scope.

"However the plan changed over time, the notion of creating a resistant human using alien DNA and regrafting that into a population has always been the stated goal."

"But not the general population," Scully said angrily, thinking of Operation Paperclip. "This was genetic engineering designed for the chosen few, specifically the families of the collaborators. The rest of the human population would fall to the bees, right? And if any of the collaborators became infected, they could be restored via your vaccine."

The clone nodded. "Yes."

"Have they created a resistant alien/human hybrid?" 

"Not as such," Kurt said. "We are an example of a more successful line, but as I said, our lifespans are short." 

"And Hannah?" 

"She could be described as a kind of hybrid," the clone said slowly, "but that is not entirely accurate. She is far more human than anything else."

"What does that mean?!" Scully was at the end of her rope now, on information overload.

"As you know, the E line was not successful…" 

Scully drew in a long breath through her nose, and stifled the urge to scream. She could see that her emotional responses were making the clone nervous. He was blinking quite rapidly, and his words had become more rushed.

"The decision was made to alter the hybridization process to more closely mimic human reproduction," he said. 

"In what way?" she demanded.

"The F and G lines were created using genetic material from two different abductees," he answered, "one of which had been altered with alien DNA."

Scully had a momentary flash of Penny Northern's kind face and her russet curls, and felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes. All she could see were little girls like Hannah with bags of poison attached to their arms. 

"The distinction between the two lines was the amount of alien DNA in the reproductive equation."

She looked askance at the clone.

"Their immune systems are not that robust," he answered her. "Probably as a result of their parasitic form of reproduction, and the manner in which it uses the virus as a primary means of doing so. Their species does not mutate new viruses the way we do, the way this world does, which makes them vulnerable. We have data on that as well, if you'd care to see it." 

She nodded wearily. "Not today, Kurt. Please continue."

"The F and G lines also failed. My understanding is that Dr. Scanlon created the H series using a different set of standards. That was the rumor at the time, but as he no longer trusted any of us, that information could not be verified. It's only upon a preliminary viewing of the data you procured that any understanding in this matter has been confirmed."

"Go on," she said. "What do you mean by standards?"

"The H series is not a line of clones," Kurt said. "They were, more accurately, siblings, although not full siblings. The amount of alien genetic material in each iteration in the line is different, although the parental genetic material remained the same."

"I understood that from the data I was able to decipher," Scully said.

"The decision was made to create the H series using more traditional human biological mechanisms, but to focus on the immunological systems by utilizing two immune genetic donors."

"Are you saying that the all of the abductees weren't infected with the black oil?" 

"There is always a control group," the clone answered. 

"Oh my God," Scully answered, "but if they infected those children without giving them full immunity –- why would they do that?" She saw the answer in the clone's eyes, and let out a breath. "To see what would happen. To see where the line was." She closed her eyes in thought. "But Hannah's other mother is also immune, that's what you're saying? I don't understand then. Why didn't her siblings survive the experiments?"

"Oh," the clone said, "I'm afraid I didn't explain that clearly. Hannah was not created by egg fusion, but by an altered sperm being injected into an ovum."

There was silence in the corridor for a full ten seconds, and when the question came, it was not her voice that spoke it. Mulder's voice, low and lethally angry, cut across the hallway like a whip crack as she turned her head in surprise. "Whose sperm was it?"

She turned back in time to see Kurt blink, as if the answer was obvious. "It was yours, Agent Mulder," he answered simply.

~*~


	3. Chapter 3

~*~

Mulder made a noise that she'd only heard once, when a suspect's punch had caught him in the solar plexus. She stepped away from Kurt toward Mulder who was staring at the clone in open-mouthed shock. Through the fog of her own surprise, she registered the anomaly of his appearance. Finally, here was a situation that Mulder, the man who regularly believed six impossible things before breakfast, had never considered. As she watched, still stunned herself, Mulder's expression transformed from disbelief to seething rage. In all the years that she had known him, she had never seen him look so angry.

"When?" Mulder gritted out through bared teeth. "How was my sperm acquired?"

Scully could see that Kurt was literally afraid of Mulder, remembering his earlier words about Dr. Calderon and the opinion of scientists involved in the project. "Mulder," she said to him in a low voice, stepping in front of him and putting her hand on his forearm. 

His hands were planted on his hips, and he shifted sideways at her touch, almost as if he was going to shake her off, but then thought better of it. He was steadfastly staring at the clone.

"Mulder," she said to him in a sharper tone, holding his arm firmly. "Ellen's Airbase, for one." His head swiveled to hers, but he stared at her blindly. "Think about it, Mulder," she said, "Alaska, Tunguska – there's been plenty of opportunity."

"Scully," he said suddenly, as if seeing her for the first time. "Hannah …" his voice was choked, and he couldn't continue.

"I know, Mulder," she said softly, her own eyes filling with tears. 

"So Scanlon made her to be a hostage?" Mulder demanded of Kurt. 

Scully bit her lip, trying to find the words to remind him that Hannah had not always been alone in that hospital room in Albany, but Kurt spoke first. 

"As I indicated to Agent Scully earlier, I believe the motivation would be replication of your immunological system." 

"Scully?" Mulder's look was accusatory. 

"A few minutes ago, Kurt told me that you've been infected with the black oil virus multiple times."

Mulder was shaking his head in denial before the words had finished leaving her mouth. "That's not true," he said.

"It's extremely well-documented," the clone said. "From your earliest tests until the most recent ones."

"What are you talking about?" Mulder demanded. "What early tests?"

"You were first infected in 1967," the clone answered. "You were hospitalized and given a small dose of the black oil, and then given what they thought was a vaccine at the time."

"That did not happen," Mulder said in a certain tone. "I'd remember that."

"Mulder," Scully soothed. "Do you remember being in the hospital when you were six?"

"I was five," he snapped. "It was in June. We drove to Boston, and I had my tonsils out." 

"They may have also taken your tonsils out," Kurt said, "but you were most certainly infected with the black oil. You were the only child to survive the treatment. They thought they were on the right track with the vaccine for years because you survived. Later they realized that you were simply resistant."

Mulder gaped at him. "What are you talking about?"

"When no one else survived the experimentation, your pediatrician was replaced with a project-approved doctor in 1971." Scully felt Mulder start. "You were injected with small doses of the vaccine, which also proved to have no effect on you. I told Agent Scully earlier that virtually no one who has received the vaccine as a preventative has survived. You are the exception." 

"This has got to be a lie," Mulder insisted. "My parents …" 

She could see the thoughts cascading through his mind, but couldn't even guess at where he was going with them. From her perspective, his parents had never protected either of their children from harm. She couldn't believe that he was defending them more than reflexively.

"Your parents consented to the first test without truly understanding what it entailed," the clone answered. "None of the parents did. It was a test of their loyalty to the project."

"But if I was resistant," Mulder said, his voice rising, "then why take Samantha? Why not take me and test me?"

"They did test you, Agent Mulder," the clone said. "You must have noticed that your pediatrician drew blood when you went for your frequent check-ups."

"I was anemic," Mulder whispered, "that was why I had to go so often. I had to take those … " Mulder stopped and stared at the clone. "Those weren't iron pills that we kept in the freezer, were they?"

"No," the clone said levelly. "They were not. And no matter how many times or ways they tried to infect you, you shed the virus. They took your blood to figure out how and why. It was your blood that led to the vaccine that you administered to Agent Scully in the Antarctic."

Mulder was shaking his head 'no'. "This doesn't make any sense!" he yelled. "If this is true, then why take Samantha? Why take any of them? Why not just take me?"

"That was proposed," the clone answered, "but they didn't make you resistant."

"I don't understand," Mulder said, but Scully believed that she was starting to.

"Mulder," Scully said, "there is always a minority that is immune to a virus." 

He stared at her, clearly not comprehending. 

"Why didn't the Black Death kill everyone who was exposed to it?" she asked. "Some people, a few people, were infected and survived. That's you. They infected you when you were a child, and somehow you survived it. The problem is that they don't know how your body fought off the original infection; they thought you had responded to their vaccine. They were trying to formulate a process for making a resistant human, but your body fought off the infection and became resistant without them having done anything. They didn't know how you made the antibodies to the virus, just that you did."

Mulder was still shaking his head 'no', but he was listening to her. He raised the arm that she wasn't holding onto and raked it through his hair, then broke away from her hold and began to stalk back and forth in the hallway. Occasionally, he would stop and stare at Kurt, then turn and look at her with an inscrutable expression on his face. 

After a few minutes of this, she finally broke the silence. "Mulder?"

"So, this is why they never killed me, isn't it?" he addressed the question to Kurt. "All these years, I could never understand why they didn't just shoot me in the head and dump my body someplace where it would never be found. It's not like they haven't made people disappear." He was as still now as he'd been frantic before, but the air around him was coiled with tension. "That's it, right? If all of their plans failed, and colonization started, I'd still be alive. I won't be changed, and I'd still be able to fight the aliens."

"That is the argument that's been forwarded, yes," the clone said. "My understanding is that your continued existence has been a subject of much discussion for years, with many dissenting opinions."

"Such as?" he demanded.

"Some project directors felt that you should be killed, that the risk of letting you discover what was going on was too high. Some felt that you should be captured for study."

Mulder nodded. "I assume that whoever took my sperm at Ellen's was in that latter category." 

"Yes," the clone answered. "I understand that you were released only because your disappearance would have been difficult to cover up. You had been very visible at the base."

"And where does Dr. Scanlon fit into this?" 

"When he heard that another division of the project had gotten some of your genetic material, he was determined to have it."

"And he obviously did!" Mulder shouted. "How many other children do I have?"

Kurt shrank backwards at Mulder's raised voice, and Scully stepped between them. In the long corridor that ran back toward the front door, she could see a dizzying number of clones, all of them looking fearfully back at her. 

"Mulder!" she said sharply. "Kurt told me that he has never participated in the creation of any clone other than himself."

"And you believed him?" he asked incredulously, his voice cracking in strain.

"You're scaring him," she said firmly and then held up her hands when it seemed he would keep speaking. "I know how you feel," she reminded him. "I know." 

Mulder sagged at her words. 

"He didn't do this to us," she added softly.

"Scully …" he said in a low murmur that only she could hear, his eyes closing in pain. Her throat constricted at the agony in his voice. She reached out to touch his face, but for the first time that she could recall, he withdrew from her. "I can't," he said to her, opening his eyes and pulling away. "I just can't." He turned away from her, only to face the door to Hannah's room. 

"Mulder," she said, in surprise.

"I can't," he said again, and then as she watched in disbelief, he began to walk rapidly down the long hall that led outside, while the clones who had been watching in the doorways ducked out of his way.

"Mulder!" She couldn't believe that he was doing this to her. He broke into a run as she called his name, and then disappeared through the doorway that led to the reception room and the winter's twilight beyond. 

"Mulder …" she exhaled his name in a sigh of disappointment, but he was already gone. She closed her eyes, her body heavy with exhaustion and sorrow. 

"Scully?" It wasn't Mulder calling her name. She could hear the fear in Hannah's voice, and she felt an ache that this would be the first time that Hannah had ever called for her. She felt the weight of all that had happened bearing down on her, but Hannah called for her again. 

She squared her shoulders, opened her eyes, and walked into their daughter's room.

~*~

Two hours later, she was still waiting for Mulder to return. Hannah had fallen asleep only after being reassured repeatedly that Mulder would come back, that he would never leave her. No matter how angry Scully was at him for leaving them, she didn't hesitate to make the promise. She knew that it was true. He would come back. The problem was that she didn't have the luxury of waiting for him. If he didn't come back right away, she would have to force the issue, as hypocritical as that would seem to him. Last winter, when she'd finally made him tell her everything he knew about her ova, she had rewarded his honesty by fleeing. When he'd told her of his dealings with the Kurt Crawfords in the lab in Allentown, and what she now realized was a carefully edited version of his dealings with Dr. Calderon, he'd tried to make her confront the possibility that there were other children like Emily in the world. 

She'd gotten up from his couch and walked out of his apartment. She hadn't answered her phone for three days and she hadn't gone home, either. She'd driven toward the sea after driving aimlessly for hours, staying at an anonymous motel on the Maryland coast, paying cash for her room. She'd gone for long walks and thought about nothing at all, barely eating and not sleeping because when she did, her dreams were hideous, full of images of her distended belly and green-blooded, toxic children. When she'd finally returned to work on a Wednesday, hollow-eyed and gaunt with exhaustion, she'd ignored the fact that he looked little better than she, or that his face was awash with guilt and sorrow. Instead, she'd made it very clear to him that she did not intend to discuss the subject any further. Ever. She knew that she'd frightened him very badly by leaving. He had never brought it up again.

They were masters of avoidance, the both of them, a matched set. That was going to have to end, because it wasn't just about them anymore. She shifted carefully off Hannah's hospital bed, then double-checked the silent cellphone on the bedside table to make sure that she hadn't missed a call. Mulder's suit and over coat were still slung over the visitor chair, as if he'd be back any minute. She'd pointed that out to Hannah while calming her for the first of many times, before she excused herself to the hall to get Frohike to put a trace on Mulder's cellphone, which she hoped was still in the car with him.

Frohike had only grudgingly agreed to do so after she insisted. He didn't understand why she wouldn't just call Mulder and 'kick his punk ass', but she had refused to explain what was going on. It was too personal, and she wouldn't discuss it with Frohike before she did so with Mulder. Her explanation that Mulder had received some upsetting news was met with sarcastic commentary about Diana Fowley and Mulder's relative level of maturity, which made her smile sadly. Frohike was nothing if not loyal to her, but she knew that at least half of his anger at Mulder stemmed from his disappointment in a man for whom he had a certain level of hero worship. 

She wondered how the Gunman would feel when they learned everything that had been revealed to them today. Mulder was even more extraordinary than Frohike had ever imagined, and for no other reason than some random combination of his parent's genes. It was as oddly fitting as it was horrendous to contemplate, the idea that Mulder would remain one of the last few humans on this vast planet should the invasion he'd always foreseen actually occur. It was beyond crazy; it was science fiction, a genre she'd never had an ounce of fondness for, much less a desire to live out.

She walked around the room restlessly. This insanity was her life now, and everything that had been done to her, everything that she had withstood, probably guaranteed that if Mulder were the last man standing, she'd be right there by his side. And Hannah … Kurt was concerned that her immune system was not as mature as it needed to be to combat terrestrial illnesses because of her alien genomic material, but he was working on an avenue of gene therapy that would require Mulder's cooperation. If that worked, then Hannah would be with them. Provided that they could protect her. If Kurt could create a viable therapy in the first place. If Mulder came back. If, if, if … she stared at the silent phone in her hands, willing it to ring, wanting to throttle Mulder and hug him at the same time.

She looked at Hannah, sleeping in the hospital bed, arms wrapped around her tiger. Mulder had stuffed it into his overcoat pocket before they left the motel this morning, knowing that Hannah would need it to comfort herself. She felt a smile blooming on her lips at the proof that Mulder had already been a good father to Hannah, simply when he was being himself. He was a good man, possibly the best she'd ever known, despite the sorrow and the irritation that life with him guaranteed her. 

Looking at Hannah, she wondered how it was that she had never seen what was now so obvious. Hannah's full mouth was opened slightly as she breathed deeply and evenly, occasional wheezes escaping her. Scully could see Mulder's reflection in Hannah's long limbs, the shape of her face, the tangle of long lashes that surrounded her unusually dark blue eyes. His genetic heritage had underwritten her own to create this child; their families had recombined in her, Hannah's wild mane a contribution from both of her lost aunts. 

Melissa would have loved Hannah, she thought with a pang. There was a kind of whimsy about them both that even as a girl Dana Scully had not had. Melissa and Hannah would have whispered secrets to each other; Melissa would have spoiled her with gifts and told her fairy tales, filling her head with lyrical nonsense. But then again, Mulder would do that anyway … wouldn't he? 

~*~

The Kurt with whom she'd spent the most time was dubious about her following Mulder back to the motel, but from Frohike's tracking, that appeared to be his most likely destination. In her heart of hearts, she didn't truly believe that he was packing up to leave her and Hannah. He was probably going to get a warm coat -- or more likely, to plan his vengeance on Dr. Scanlon, but she wasn't about to stand by and wait for the next phone call. Those days were over, a promise she'd made to a sleeping Hannah when she kissed her goodbye, after impressing upon the infirmary Kurt the necessity of calling her if Hannah awoke before she and Mulder returned. 

She walked across the paved blacktop toward their motel room in her sturdy new boots, leaving the worried clone at the entrance to the parking lot. The night was clear and cold, with dizzying swirls of stars scattered across the sky. The moon was just a sliver, barely visible above the western horizon, its dim reflective light no competition for the brilliance of the late winter constellations. She recognized the planet Jupiter, shining hard and bright above the thumbnail moon. A sailor's daughter still, she knew the patterns of the universe in their seasons, could rely upon them to light her way in case she needed to navigate unfamiliar waters. Today was the first day of the lunar month, a day appropriate for starting new patterns of behaviour, Melissa had always told her. Winter, despite the piles of snow visible all around her, was ending in just a couple of days. It was St. Patrick's Day, and St. Joseph's Day was just around the corner.

She wasn't superstitious, but even she could not ignore such a confluence of positive signs. She would take all the help she could get, supernatural or otherwise, to get her through these next few minutes. A hand on the hood of their rental car assured her that Mulder hadn't been back in the room long. As she drew closer to the door of their motel room, she was startled to hear the sounds of a struggle coming from inside. She thought grimly of the chip in her neck, and drew her gun, sure that they'd been discovered. She peered in at the windows, but could see nothing through the tightly drawn curtains. Inside, the sounds of crashing and breaking wood continued. She tested the doorknob. To her surprise, it gave easily. She didn't hesitate, coming in low with her gun drawn, forgoing announcing her presence. Just this one time, she wanted to have the element of surprise on her side. 

It took her a few seconds to register what she was seeing before Mulder wheeled on her, drawing his own gun. He was alone in their room, chest heaving and red-faced with fury. The splintered door of the closet swung drunkenly on its hinges; the bureau gaped like a jack o' lantern where drawers were missing. Empty, they lay smashed on the floor in front of her, looking as if they had been stomped on.

Mulder stared at her, and for the first time ever, she saw the madman in him that all of the naysayers at the FBI had warned her about. He was feral and furious, and not at all happy to see her. He tossed his gun on the bed they'd slept in the night before, and said, "Go away, Scully," before he turned and administered a savage kick to the closet door.

"No," she said, her voice still faint with shock. She stepped into the room and closed and locked the door, while he kicked and pulled at the closet door, trying his level best to break it.

"Go away," he ordered, not turning around.

"No," she said again, holstering her gun. "You come back to the clinic with me. Hannah is terrified that you've left her."

His head swiveled at her words and for an instant, she saw pure hatred.

"That," he said, in a rough voice he'd never before used on her, "was a really cheap shot."

"It's the truth," she countered. "I had to reassure her over and over again that you'd be coming back. She heard you yelling, you know. It frightened her." She continued on ruthlessly. "She has adored you from the minute you found her, Mulder. You are the first person that has ever loved her, the only father she's ever known."

Mulder closed his eyes in real pain at her words, "Scully."

"You are her father, Mulder," she said firmly, knowing that she was being brutal, but not caring to pull her punches. She barely stopped herself from adding, 'Act like it.' 

He wheeled around from the closet door and faced her, towering in his rage. "You think I don't KNOW THAT!" he bellowed at her. "I loved her from the instant I saw her!" His eyes were wild with grief and loss. "I loved her because she was yours, and now …" he trailed off, and she felt her own tears welling up. 

"I know how you feel, Mulder," she reminded him, taking a step toward him.

"Do you?" he challenged her. "Do you really, Scully?"

That did sting, and the tears that she'd been damming up for days began to fall in earnest now. "How could you say something like that," she spat out, choking on her tears, "to me. Of course, I know how you feel."

Mulder was shaking his head 'no' at her insistently, and although he looked stricken at her tears, he wasn't backing down. "No, you don't," he said.

"Mulder!" She was puzzled and angered by his recalcitrance. She took another step toward him, but he flinched away from her, striding across the room to the window, and turning his back to her.

"You don't, Scully!" 

"Oh, really?" she said, "because your feelings are so precious somehow?" Her tone was blisteringly caustic. "Because I don't know what it's like to be raped? To have all my choices taken from me?"

She heard Mulder's painful exhalation from across the room an instant before he kicked the wall hard enough to make the windows rattle. When he spoke again, it was clear that he was fighting for control. 

"You don't understand, Scully," he said, but his tone was flat with sorrow.

"Then tell me!" she shouted at him. "Tell me!"

Mulder was silent for a while, his whole body still. His arms were wrapped around himself protectively, hands over his elbows. He did not turn to face her. "They would have let the whole world die," he said quietly, "and given me a front row seat to watch it -- left me all alone to fight it, after they have done their level best to strip me of every weapon I've ever tried to raise against them."

She felt her blood freeze at the desolate, blank tone of his voice.

"You don't understand, Scully, that it's never enough with these people," he continued, "they ruin _everything_ ," he said with emphasis. "And I never understood why, but now I see it. They hate me for being the one thing that they can't be, so they have ruined everything in my life."

"Mulder," she said to him softly, walking around the bed to get closer to him, but he drew further away. "No, Mulder."

"They took Sam," he said, "they destroyed my family. Not that it was worth much, as it turns out, but they ruined it anyway." His voice was remote, as if he were circling the Earth from a great distance. "I was a suspect in Sam's disappearance, you know," he said conversationally. "And Martha's Vineyard is a small place. I was an outcast for the rest of the time that I spent there, pretty much. So, no home," he laughed, but it was more like a sob, short and bitter, "nothing to go back to, nothing to depend upon."

His voice was ragged with tears and getting softer. "Until … well. I had this idea," he was whispering now, "I had this dream. When I found out what they'd done to you, I knew it wouldn't come true, but I still … I dreamt about it anyway."

It was hard to understand him through his tears, so she got as close to him as she possibly could without touching him. 

"But they couldn't even leave me that," he said wonderingly. "Because they have to ruin everything. So they took it, and they perverted it," he said in a tone of disgust. "They corrupted it, and they ruined it."

She drew in a breath, realizing to what he was alluding. "No, Mulder," she said to him. She put her hand on his back, and when he tried to pull away from her, she blocked him into the corner, knowing that this time he wouldn't force his way by her. 

He was shaking his head, "You're wrong, Scully. Because they can't even leave me my dreams – they'll find a way to ruin them anyway."

"No, Mulder," she insisted, pulling at his elbow so that she could get in between him and the wall. If she could just get him to look at her … but his voice, affectless yet somehow full of pain, continued on in an insistent drone.

"That's why you should get away from me, Scully, because it'll just keep happening if you stay, they'll just keep ruining everything."

"No, Mulder," she said desperately. She wedged her shoulder in between him and the wall, but kept her other arm wrapped around him tightly so that he couldn't get away from her. "That's not true," she was crying now, openly. "They can't ruin this."

"They ruin everything, Scully," he insisted.

She grabbed hold of his head and turned his face toward her, seeing the exhaustion in his eyes. They were dark with sorrow and pain, the rage that had been driving him for hours extinguished like a candle that had been blown out. 

"No," she repeated. "They can't ruin this." It was an impossible situation, in an impossible world, and she needed him to be there with her, fighting by her side. Hannah needed him. "They can't ruin us."

"Scully," he said, and a ghost of a smile touched his lips before it twisted down into a grimace. "They already have."

"No." She thought of the past month, of the silence and remove that had existed between them, of her own fears that what he said was coming true, and the determination grew in her. She rose on her toes and pressed her mouth to his, feeling him go stock-still in her grip. She used his surprise as leverage, and pushed more of herself between him and the wall, pressing against him as fully as possible. She tipped up again and ran her hands into his hair, pulling him down to her.

She kissed his full lips tenderly, tasting both of their tears. She breathed against his mouth, "They can't have this, Mulder." His eyes were closed, so she kissed their lids, willing him to hear her, to open his eyes and see the truth. Her fingers traced the ridges in his hard head, the cage of bone that encompassed the mind she loved so well, trying to impress her will upon him. "I won't let them take this."

She was halfway to his mouth again when she heard his gasp, and felt him push her back against the wall. She looped her arms around his neck and readied herself for a struggle. She was not letting go.

Mulder's eyes were open and he was staring at her as if he'd never before seen her. 

"Are you listening to me now, Mulder?" she asked him quietly, not flinching from his penetrating gaze. She spoke clearly, her own tears in abeyance for the moment. "I won't let them take this, and I won't let you give it to them. They can't have it," she enunciated clearly. "They can't have us."

"Scully …" his name for her was exhaled in a tone that was half question, half wonder. He was searching her eyes. 

There was something in his expression that reminded her of being in his hallway the summer before. Then, his yearning for her had been clear, but there had been something of defeat in his posture, in the very air about him, even as he moved in to kiss her. Or maybe she was the one who was different. Months ago, she'd barely been able to admit to herself that she wanted him to kiss her, much less believe that was what he wanted. 

It was all different now. She returned his regard steadily, letting him see the truth in her eyes. She watched his surprise transform into hope and then darken into hunger the instant before he bent his head to catch her parted lips with his own. The arms that he'd used to hold her away from him wrapped around her as he pressed himself against her.

"Scully …" he whispered in a husky groan as she slid an arm down to his lower back, pulling his hips closer to hers. 

His kisses were urgent now, grasping for more as they clung to each other. 

She couldn't keep the smile from her lips at the feel of him, hard and ready for her, and their kiss broke as they both gasped for air. He took the opportunity to trail kisses over her jaw line and down her neck. She moaned and tilted her head, running her hands over his shoulders and up through the hair on the back of his head. After all this time, all the longing … he really did love her. 

"Scully," he said to her again, sounding dazed. 

She planted a hand behind her to push herself away from the wall and guide them toward the bed, when the pounding in her ears was echoed by a pounding on the front door. 

Mulder and she both started at the sound. She pulled her gun, relieved to have it no longer digging in her back; Mulder bent over, reaching for his ankle holster. 

"I have the key," a woman's voice said sternly. "If the door doesn't open in twenty seconds, I'm going to use it."

Mulder closed his eyes. "Manager," he said. 

Scully nodded, wiping around her mouth to get at whatever lipstick remained. "I imagine she has her shotgun," she said. 

"Yeah," he said, starting to move toward the door.

"Mulder," she said, stepping in front of him. She glanced pointedly downward, then pushed him to sit on the bed, handing him her gun. "I'll go."

She straightened her clothes and hair hastily as she moved, grabbing Mulder's gun from the other bed and tossing it to him before she stopped behind the door, gathering herself. She glanced over at Mulder. He'd put the guns on the far side of him so they'd be out of sight, and sat with his elbows braced on his knees. He nodded at her, his face flushed from passion, his eyes still sparkling.

"I'm coming in!" the voice announced from the other side of the door. 

Scully opened it and came face to face with the irate owner of the motel. The woman's shotgun was out and pointed toward the open door, but she lowered it when she saw Scully, using it to lever the door open further so that she could peer into the room. She made a noise of disgust when she saw the closet and the bureau, her mouth a thin line of anger. Her frank gaze turned to Scully; it was clear that she disapproved of what she saw. "I thought better of you," she said to Scully. "You looked like an intelligent woman from what little I saw of you. If you need help getting away from him, it's here now."

Scully shook her head, dismayed to realize what the motel owner thought. "It's really not that kind of situation," she said. "I'm very sorry about the damage, but we'll pay for it."

"Oh, he'll pay for it all right," the woman said, "but what in the hell are you doing? You've got a little girl to protect, and instead you're putting her in danger by being with him."

Scully felt the sting of tears, but she spoke firmly and reflexively. "He would never hurt our daughter."

Behind her, she heard Mulder choke back something that sounded suspiciously like a sob. 

The woman peered into the room, stepping further into the doorway so that she could see Mulder, who now sat with his head in his hands. 

"Where is your little girl?" she said suspiciously.

Scully stepped in between her and Mulder again, wanting to shield him from scrutiny. "Our daughter's in the clinic," she said quietly, and then hastened to continue when the woman's gun began to rise. "We came here because she's been so sick," she said, "and today they told us …" she drifted off, her thoughts scattering. She'd never been a very nimble liar and she couldn't think of what to tell the woman that was believable. Behind her, the sound of Mulder crying became audible, and she stumbled, repeating her last words and then covering her mouth in distress at his pain. Her own tears began falling thick and fast. 

The motel owner stared at her, and then at Mulder. Her stony expression changed as she regarded him, and she turned to look at Scully with true sympathy. "I'm very sorry," she said. 

Scully nodded, barely able to speak, realizing what the woman had inferred and just how close it had come to being true with Hannah, as it had been with her sisters. "My husband is just very upset right now," she choked out. "We'll pay for the damage. I'm sorry."

The woman returned the shotgun to rest across her body, cradling it in the crook of an elbow. She pointed at Scully's cross, and then said, "If you believe, then don't give up. I will pray for your little girl." She paused. "And I trust that I won't have to be coming back here."

Scully nodded and closed the door, resting her head against the cool metal for a moment. She wondered exactly what it was that she believed in anymore, here in the incomprehensible world in which she now lived. Mulder's choked sobs brought her back to herself and she stepped over to the bed and around him, picking up their guns and putting them on the nightstand. She turned back, intending to sit down next to him, when he surprised her by reaching out and drawing her into the space between his legs, laying his head against her abdomen and encircling her with his arms. He had quieted for the moment, but she could sense that his tears hadn't been as cathartic as she'd hoped. It was just a momentary calm. Her hands sifted through his hair while she waited, feeling Mulder breathe against her. 

After a while, he let out a long breath, then looked up at her. "Samantha's dead, isn't she, Scully?"

She could not possibly have kept the shock from her expression, and knew that he could see the truth in her eyes. His own closed in pain and he turned his face back into her stomach. She bent to gather him more securely in her arms, but he was wrapped tightly around her, and the pose was awkward. 

"I'm sorry," she said over and over, "Kurt just told me. I don't know how, Mulder. I swear I didn't know until today."

Her only answer was his weeping, and it was the raw sound of his heartbreak that finally got to her. She wrapped her arms around his head and let go of all the tears she had held in forever. 

*~*

When she began to calm down, she found Mulder watching her with something like his usual intent expression, but with the addition of the assessment that she'd become too used to seeing over the course of the past month. She closed her eyes against whatever insight he was having. She was drained, and his grasp on her was probably the only thing keeping her upright. She was slumped against him, knees pressed along the edge of the bed, his legs still bracketing hers, his arms wrapped around her. He shifted so she was sitting on his right leg, then leant over and plucked tissue from the nightstand, handing some of it to her. She expected him to attend to his own tears, but when he began to dry off her face, she returned the favor, wiping his wet cheeks and nose. 

"Blow," he said to her, and she made a face at him instead, wresting the tissues from his hand. She blew her own nose, and tried to calm herself. She was still shaking, the aftershocks of so much emotion jangling her nerves. 

He discarded their used tissues with his usual aplomb, sinking them into the basket in a high, arcing shot before turning back to her. He drew her against his chest, drawing patterns on her hip with his thumb. His other hand smoothed her hair, tucking it behind her ear. He regarded her with a tender expression, while her breath hitched in and out. He leant down and kissed her brow, while his hand drifted down to her left hand. His long fingers lightly traced the rings on her finger as he regarded her. "I liked to hear you call me that," he said.

"What?" she whispered back. 

He looked at her, his face and hair damp from both of their tears, his reddened eyes pinning her with their intense stare. His arm held her firmly in place as she leant against him, exhausted. "Your husband," he said. 

She swallowed hard at his statement, but didn't break his gaze. 

"Could you see me as your husband?" he asked. His voice was serious and soft.

"You are my partner, Mulder," she said, but he didn't answer her, just continued to look her in the eye. 

The silence spun out in the room, but she could still hear the echo of her own voice naming him as such. She knew that no matter what she said, he could already see the answer in her eyes. What he wanted was to hear her say it, for her to be as honest with him now as she'd been earlier. She took a deep breath, and never breaking his gaze, gave him the only possible answer, the truth. "Yes."

Mulder's chest heaved under her ribs; a light came into his eyes that she'd never before seen. His lips curved into something not quite a smile, and settled there. The hand that had been tracing her rings, rose to trace her face, her neck, her shoulder, her side. He laid her back on the bed, hovering above her as his hand continued down over her hip and leg until he reached her boot. He drew the zipper down, watching her the whole time. She was poised, waiting for his kiss, but instead he continued to watch her, gazing into her eyes as first one, then the other boot was discarded. He hooked his arm around her knees and pulled her legs up onto the bed, and settled himself over her. 

He was still regarding her with that intent gaze, tracing her hairline with his fingers. She felt like she could see right into his soul, and was aware that he was looking into hers. Part of her had been afraid that his desire for her was tied to the losses he had suffered, that she was all he had to cling to. But the things he'd said earlier, the way he was looking at her now ... 

He kissed her once, sure and sweet, and drew back, his hand slipping down to unknot his tie, and then unbutton his shirt. He drew his clothes off one by one, only stopping to kiss her. There was nothing hurried about his movements. He was measured in the way he revealed his warm skin to her, his eyes a steady burn as they returned to hers over and over. It was almost like he was assuring her and himself that this was no dream, that the connection between the two of them was real, that this was really happening. 

She needed no such reassurance, overwhelmed as she was by the physicality of him, bared and alive under her hands. She was unable to stop herself from touching him, kissing him as he began to surely divest her of her clothing. 

It was easier and more intense than anything she'd ever experienced. He pinned her to the bed with his eyes as they moved against each other, learning, adapting to each other. He was whispering something, but she wasn't sure that she comprehended it, lost as she was in the sensation, in the finality of it all. 

She understood why it was that he wouldn't close his eyes for long, why he kept returning to their intimate gaze. In all their years together, this was the only way that she had not known him, and she was hungry for the experience. Watching the naked love in his eyes, feeling it resonate through her very bones, she felt a kind of ecstasy unassociated with her body's rising tenor. She could never have felt this way with anyone other than Mulder, would never have allowed herself to be known in this way with any other. 

In the aftermath, when their breathing had returned to its normal pace, he kissed her over and over, until they were both smiling too much to continue. He moved them under the covers as they clung to each other, shivering this time from the cold they had not before noticed. She reached over him to retrieve yet more tissue to wipe away their mutual tears. It was the first time in forever that she had cried because of happiness, and they laughed at the same time. She knew without asking that they had shared the same thought.

Mulder lay in her arms, head against her breast, listening to her heartbeat. Somehow, it didn't surprise her that he wasn't sleepy. She felt far too alive to sleep just now. Instead, she explored the wide expanse of his shoulders and his back. She'd always secretly loved that part of his body, and now she committed it to sense memory, allowing her fingers to drift up to the nape of his neck and back down across the warm skin that sheltered him, muscle and bone. 

Mulder's eyes were closed, and he hummed against her in satisfaction. They rested there together in the quiet for a long time, not speaking. She had always wondered if it would be awkward, the aftermath of their inevitable lovemaking, had imagined several different scenarios. She'd never considered this ease as one of the possibilities.

Mulder shifted up out of her arms to lay alongside her. He propped his head on his hand, then began to trace her features with an elegant finger, dropping his head to kiss her after running his fingers over her lips. The new light in his eyes had not waned, and she said a silent prayer that it never would. He drew back and watched her again, his generous mouth still curved with happiness. "I love you, you know," he said to her.

She smiled to hear him say it, despite the fact that she had no doubts about his feelings for her. She nodded in affirmation, leaning up to kiss him. "I love you too, Mulder," she said.

This time around, Mulder's Cheshire cat grin was full of teeth. She could feel herself smiling back at him, and watched his smile grow even wider. They were impossible and absurd, and she was happier than she'd ever been, despite everything that had happened to bring them to this moment. Mulder leant forward and kissed the tip of her nose, and then the mole above her lip. 

"I've always wanted to kiss you there," he announced. 

She eyebrowed him in what she hoped was an evocative fashion.

"I suppose it's only fair to warn you that's just one out of many places," he said. 

"I'll consider myself warned, then," she said in a mock serious tone.

He was stroking her collarbones, tracing the bones in her shoulder. "Was Hannah really upset?" he asked suddenly. 

"Yes," she answered, "but she was sleeping when I left."

He sighed. "We should go back soon," he said regretfully.

She nodded, but made no move to break away from him. 

"We have a daughter, Scully," he said wonderingly. He shook his head, "I never really thought any of this would happen." 

She watched him speaking, letting him share his thoughts with her. 

"It's what I always wanted," he said finally. He'd been quiet for long minutes, but his hands had not been idle, as he continued mapping her flesh. 

"A family, Mulder?" she asked.

He shook his head. "A family with you," he said. "My whole life, I've been trying to get back the family that I lost. Samantha …" he said quietly, and she watched him carefully, afraid that they'd lose the equilibrium they'd so recently gained. "Since my goal was to get back what I lost, the idea of having a family of my own wasn't something I really considered." He had been watching his hand sliding across the skin of her breast as he spoke, but now he looked her in the eye. "Until I met you." 

She felt her skin flush at his words. 

"Not right away," he said apologetically. "Not for a long time, if I'm truthful about it. It wasn't until you were sick that I realized, that I actually became conscious of how I felt about you. When I was faced with losing you -- that was when I understood myself."

"But, Mulder," she began, "you knew that I couldn't have children."

He shrugged. "I figured that we'd find a way around it. Besides," he said, sliding his hand up to cradle her chin in it, "having you would have been enough family for me."

"All that time," she said to him, and she knew her voice was faintly accusatory.

"I never said I was brave," Mulder said. "It was easier to indulge the dream, to believe that someday would just … come. I never considered that it wouldn't happen, until recently." 

She regarded him soberly. The wound from their recent estrangement was just barely scarred. "We have to talk to each other, Mulder," she said. "We can't keep secrets from each other, not anymore. No more secret investigations for either of us."

He was nodding as he listened to her. "I know." He lay his head down on his bicep, and she turned on her side, facing him.

He took a deep breath in, and played with the cross at her neck. "What do we tell Hannah?" 

"You mean, how do we tell her that we're her parents?"

"Should we tell her?" he asked.

"Why wouldn't we tell her?" she was confused by the very idea.

"If she's just got a matter of months …" Mulder swallowed very hard and looked on the verge of tears. "It seems cruel to me."

"Mulder!" she propped herself up on an elbow and stared at him. "What makes you think that Hannah's going to die?"

His expression was wary as he addressed her. "The Kurts that I spoke to at the lab said that their average lifespan is five years." 

She was shaking her head before he finished speaking. "That has nothing to do with Hannah, Mulder," she said. "The Kurts are the clones of a teenaged boy whose genome was altered in ways that I can't even begin to comprehend."

Mulder stared at her. "But the alien DNA …" he said, "they said that the recombination of human DNA with it was unstable."

"You saved her life by taking her away from Scanlon," she said firmly. "But before that you saved her life because she had enough of your DNA to withstand their 'treatment'," she spat the word out, repulsed at the notion.

Mulder looked stunned. "But the other girls …"

"They died because they couldn't withstand the repeated exposure to the black oil," she said. "It's ironic, but it is probably the alien DNA that killed them. Kurt believes that Hannah's immune system is immature because of her alien DNA, not because of us."

"Are you saying that she's going to survive this?" He seemed afraid to hope.

Scully nodded. "Kurt does have concerns about Hannah's immune system, but he has an idea of how to fix that. Hannah needs your blood, Mulder," she said. "We need to graft some of your super-immunity into her."

Mulder looked astonished. "Are you sure about this, Scully? Are you sure she's going to live?"

"I'm not positive, Mulder, but the Kurt who has reviewed Hannah's records seemed confident to me. He's offered to show me the data, but from what he explained of the processes that were utilized to create the clones, it's vastly different from the IVF-like process that they used to create Hannah," she answered him. "She is not a clone, and she's not susceptible to the same sort of aging problems that the Kurts are."

"And Samantha was," he said, "Right?"

She nodded sadly. "Kurt offered to share the data with me on Samantha, but I haven't seen it."

"The original Kurt Crawford is dead though, isn't he?" Mulder's voice was quiet, but sure.

"He told me that none of the original selves of those that were 'given'," she grimaced in distaste as she placed emphasis on the word that Kurt had used, "survived the process."

Mulder startled at her words, "Cassandra Spender?"

Scully could feel her brow draw down as she thought about that, "I don't know the answer to that question, Mulder," she said slowly. "Kurt is very literal, and I asked him if any of the children had survived the hybridization process, and he said that none had survived in their original form. He said that any that we had met were clones, but that some of them may not known they were clones." 

Mulder reached his hand out to play with her cross again. He was nodding. "I met one of those Samanthas," he said quietly.

"Mulder?" She had no idea what he was talking about.

"When you were sick," he said, and paused. He looked at her, and she saw the pain in his eyes. "When you were dying," he said hoarsely, "Cancerman offered me a deal to save you. He used Samantha to bait the hook."

"What happened?" she whispered.

"I met her at a diner," he said. "She looked just like the other adult Samanthas we'd met, but she was dressed like a suburban mom. She was very ill-at-ease with me," he paused. "She told me that she thought our mother was dead and that Cancerman was her father," he said bitterly, "And that she didn't remember any other family, and she wasn't interested in getting to know me."

"Oh, Mulder," she reached out and put her hand on his face. 

"She said that she had a family of her own, children to consider. She practically ran out of the diner to get away from me, back to the car where he sat waiting, smoking. She let him wipe away her tears."

She hadn't thought it was possible for her heart to break more than it already had, but this life seemed to determine to prove her wrong. She wrapped her arms around Mulder and pulled him close. He accepted her comfort for a few minutes before he broke away.

"It pretty much destroyed me at the time," he said, brushing the hair from her brow, "especially with you so sick. I really thought that I was going to lose the both of you at the same time."

"I'm right here," she reminded him. She felt his hand slip around to the back of her neck. His thumb ran over her scar.

He bent to kiss her, then pressed their foreheads together. "You'll never know how grateful I am for that, Scully," he said. "Truly." He was quiet for another minute. "The more I thought about the woman in the diner, the less it seemed plausible to me that she was really Samantha," he said. "But the idea that he would raise one of the clones as his own, just to use as a blind at some future point …" He shook his head. "That seemed insane, even to me. But now … seeing all those Kurts today, knowing that they're the clones of someone else's lost child, a child that no one ever mentioned once … how could Samantha have survived?"

"I'm so sorry," she reiterated, feeling that her words were totally inadequate.

Mulder accepted her condolences wordlessly, but his eyes let her know that he understood. She wasn't sure that was true.

"I have never wanted to kill another person," she said to him, choosing her words carefully, "never understood the impulse that would drive someone to feel that they had the right to make that decision. But I understand it now. Those men, Mulder, they deserved what they got at El Rico. They deserved to die," she said fiercely. "Not because of what they've done to me and you, but because of what they did to their own children, to our children. The only sorrow I feel is for their family members."

Mulder nodded at her words.

"I think of Jeffrey Spender now, and I feel horribly sad for him," she continued. "If Cancerman really was his father …" she drifted off, watching Mulder. "What chance did he have at a good life? He believed that his mother was crazy, but the truth is that his father allowed his colleagues to torture her, all so they could save their own skins."

"I wonder about how the whole hybrid program started," Mulder said. "Was it all a ruse all along, an idea that the aliens planted to keep the Consortium members diverted?"

She shook her head. "I don't know."

"And what does it mean that they're all dead now? I can't believe that bodes well for us. It feels like a double-cross," he mused. "And if anyone deserved to be double-crossed, it was Ol' Smoky. There is irony there, I guess."

"But he still managed to escape though, didn't he?" She was aware how bitter her voice was, but didn't attempt to rein in her tone.

Mulder looked guilty. "I've had more than one opportunity to kill him," he said, "and I didn't take them. I'd like to believe that's out of my desire to expose their deeds on the world stage – because if we stopped them without public exposure, they'd just re-start their projects elsewhere, but … the whole truth is that he's toyed with me over the years." His tone had turned scathing. "He'd dangle Samantha over my head, and I'd jump, time after time after time. I should have known that she was dead a long time ago. I just didn't want to believe it." He paused. "Not anymore. It's time to stop doing what they expect us to do."

"What are you thinking, Mulder?" she asked him.

"I don't exactly have a plan yet," he said, "but I do know that I'm damned tired of being their pawn."

She nodded in response. "What were you looking for, Mulder?"

He looked confused by her question, "When?"

"When you found Hannah," she said quietly.

His expression cleared. "I … " he tilted his head back and stared at her, his expressive eyes green and bronze in the lamplight. "When you said that this was personal – I knew that, Scully. I've known that for a long time, but I guess I understood you in a different way than I had before," he said. "I found myself thinking about everything that's happened to you," he paused. "And I decided it was time to find Dr. Scanlon. I thought that I could get some justice for you, for all the women they robbed and murdered."

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes, but for once, didn't try to hide them.

"And I thought, if I found him, I'd find another store of your ova," he continued softly. "I wanted to give your choices back to you."

She closed the small distance between them, pouring all of the love that she felt for him into her kiss.

~*~

Their lovemaking that second time was ardent enough that she stumbled over a pillow on the floor by the bathroom door when she went to wash up later. It had somehow traveled from their bed over the empty one, to lie in wait and trip her.

She turned from the door, the laughter bubbling in her throat and couldn't help but survey the room with her investigator's eye. If she were trying to reconstruct the last couple of hours, she could certainly make the case that this had been a crime scene, with the marked disarray of the bed and the damage done to the furnishings.

But the other clues, the pile of clothing intermingled on the floor, the askew lampshade on the nightstand, and of course, the body in the bed, told another story. Mulder lay on his stomach, barely covered by the bedclothes she'd left behind when she fashioned herself a toga out of a desire for warmth, if not modesty. His arms were under the one pillow that they'd found on the floor, and he regarded her sleepily, one eye peering at her from under the overhang of his tousled hair. The bruising and burn mark from the taser was still faintly visible on the skin over his ribcage, but even that jarring sight was a testament of his love for her and didn't detract from his overall beauty.

"Why don't you come recreate the scene of the crime from over here?" he asked. His tone was honeyed, despite the gritty quality of his sleepy voice. "The view is equally good."

"Not from my perspective," she answered archly, as he rolled and stretched languidly, propping himself up on an elbow. "My view is unparalleled." Her tone was rich with innuendo.

"Scully," he huffed in surprise.

She was secretly pleased to see a blush stain his skin. She'd always suspected that he was not as shameless as he pretended to be. Happily, he was shameless enough in just the right ways.

"We need to get back to the clinic," she said, and he sighed, but nodded his head. She knew that he wanted to stretch their idyll here to its limits, but it was after two in the morning, and reality, in the form of a worried four-year-old, beckoned. "Are you coming?" she asked, turning into the bathroom as she dropped her toga on the hapless pillow.

She only half heard his predictable response as she turned on the water in the shower.

~*~

They were lucky that Hannah was still asleep when they got back to Prometheus, although from the worried expression on her face when they crept into the room, Scully was sure that hadn't always been the case. She read Hannah's chart carefully, pleased to see that her vital signs had stabilized further as her temperature had continued to decrease. It was still elevated at slightly more than 100, but Hannah had not yet been on the antibiotics for 24 hours. However, the fact that it remained elevated raised a red flag for Scully. It could be that Hannah's infection was more resistant than she had anticipated. Conversely, she wasn't actually sure what Hannah's true body temperature was when she wasn't sick, and with the alteration of her genome, she couldn't assume that 98.6 was the suitable standard. She looked up at the clock to check the time. Hannah was voiding appropriately, so rehydration therapy had been discontinued. Her next batch of antibiotics would be hung in a few hours, and the line in her hand had been capped off for the moment. She made a note to check Hannah's hand to ensure that the needle was situated correctly before the next infusion was begun.

When she finished with her notation, she found Mulder sitting next to Hannah staring intently at their daughter. She felt a thrill of recognition at his expression as he sat, right arm braced on the other side of Hannah's small sleeping form, searching for the familiar in her. She moved from the end of the bed to the other side, looking from his beloved and well-known profile to the newly beloved and less known countenance of their daughter. She was making her own comparisons between the two of them, when she realized that Mulder's intent regard was slowly but surely waking Hannah. Like father, like daughter -- she could feel herself smiling, and didn't attempt to stop Mulder. It was probably better for Hannah to be reassured than to stay asleep right now.

"Scully?" Mulder's whisper cut through her reverie. He looked pointedly at the chart dangling from her hands before his eyes returned to hers.

"Oh," she began to answer, "she's …"

"Mulder?" Hannah's worried voice cut through hers, and Mulder's head snapped toward the child.

"Hi –" before his mouth had finished forming the word, Hannah had popped up out of the covers, flung her arms around his neck and burst into tears. "Oh, pumpkin," Mulder said sorrowfully, and Scully could see how sorry he was. "I'm right here, sweetheart," he said. "I'm so sorry that I worried you."

He rubbed her back as Hannah started to calm, then her body became rigid and she looked around frantically. She relaxed when she saw Scully. "You both left me!" she accused, and Scully dropped the chart on the night table and sat down on the bed next to Mulder, her left hip bumping against his right in the middle of the bed as they faced Hannah.

"I'm sorry, Hannah," Scully said. She leant toward Hannah, intending to kiss her forehead, but Hannah surprised her by wrapping her arms around Scully's neck to pull her closer, although she did not retreat from Mulder's lap.

"I was scared," Hannah hiccupped. "I don't like being alone."

Scully's eyes filled with tears as she fought back the images of Hannah alone and sick while her sisters were dying around her in that room in Albany.

Mulder put his right arm around Scully and tugged her closer so that the both of them were sheltering Hannah. She pulled her legs up onto the bed.

"I know, Hannah," he soothed. "We promise it won't happen again."

Hannah backed away from Mulder enough to look from one to the other of them suspiciously. She was rubbing the fabric of her nightgown worriedly between her fingers, a gesture that Scully hadn't seen her make in days. It caused an unexpected pang. "You promise?" she said querulously. Her eyes were large in her pale oval face, framed by her unruly, sleep-mussed hair.

"We promise," Scully said firmly.

"OK," Hannah said, after a minute. She curled up against Mulder with a contented sigh, but put a hand on Scully's leg as if to hold her there, watching her with one bright eye.

Mulder kissed Hannah's head, wrapping his left arm around her tight.

"Where'd you go?" she asked Scully softly.

"Back to the motel," Scully said. "I met Mulder there, and we got our things."

"Oh," Hannah said. "Are we going somewhere else?"

"Not until you're all better," Scully said easily. "So your – Mulder and I thought we should get our things so that we'd have them here with us." She was surprised at how easily calling Mulder 'your father' had almost slipped right out of her mouth. Luckily, Hannah hadn't noticed, but Mulder certainly had. He was grinning at her.

He nodded at her, encouraging her, but she wasn't sure how to explain that they were her parents to Hannah. In truth, she wasn't that sure of how much Hannah understood about parents and families. Everything Hannah knew about family life she'd learned from television, not from any real experience. And she wasn't sure if it was a blessing or an additional sorrow that Hannah didn't seem to realize that the other girls in her room in Albany had been her sisters.

She took a deep breath in. "Hannah, do you remember that Mulder told you we were going to try and find your family – to find out who your mom and dad are?" Someday, she knew, they would have to explain to Hannah just how it was that she hadn't been with them for the first years of her life, but today was not that day.

"Yes," Hannah said, but her lower lip began to stick out. She pulled her hand off of Scully, and turned her head, burying her face in Mulder's chest.

"What's the matter?" Mulder asked, looking down at her.

"I don't want to go away from you," she said. Her voice was muffled because she was speaking into Mulder's torso, but the petulant tone was clear.

Scully felt the tension that had gripped her at having this conversation just ebb away as Mulder jostled Hannah and kissed her head, trying unsuccessfully to get her to look up. Hannah just burrowed in deeper.

"You don't have to go anywhere, Hannah," Scully said surely, and Hannah became completely still in Mulder's arms. "I promise you. You belong with us, Mulder and me. We are your family."

Hannah's head popped away from Mulder's chest. One hand raised up to push the mass of curls that had flopped over her brow away so that she could look at them both. Her brow was drawn down in concentration as she looked from Mulder to Scully. "You're my mom?" she whispered.

Scully nodded, aware that she was smiling through the tears that were falling. "Yes," she said, "and Mulder really is your Daddy."

Hannah launched herself at Scully, and Scully gasped as Hannah threw her arms around her neck. Until that moment, she hadn't realized how very much she had wanted Hannah to do that. Her arms wrapped around her child fully for the first time and she closed her eyes and just held her. When she opened them, Mulder was regarding her with a heartfelt expression of love, tears streaming down his cheeks and over his wide smile.

"Hey!" he complained after a minute. "Don't Daddies get any hugs around here?"

Hannah giggled; Scully could feel the vibration against her neck, the rise and fall of Hannah's small body against her breast. It was an exquisite sensation. She bent her head and kissed Hannah on the cheek. "Do you think we should hug him, Hannah?" she teased.

"I already hugged him," Hannah said, speaking into Scully's neck.

Mulder pouted, and Scully could not help but laugh. His expression had a totally different resonance for her now.

"That was before I was your Daddy," Mulder said in a whiny tone.

Hannah giggled again, and Scully eyebrowed him. "Technically, Mulder …" she began, but he interrupted.

"So, that's it, then," he said. "No more hugs for Mulder?"

Hannah turned around out of Scully's arms, and looked at him sternly. "Daddy," she corrected. Then, she held out her arms.

Mulder looked like he might burst into tears, as he bent over to hug Hannah, leaving her in Scully's lap.

When he broke away from Hannah, he pointed at Scully and asked gently, "And who's that?"

"That's my mom," Hannah said in a satisfied and proud tone. She leaned back against Scully, who couldn't help but wrap her arms around her.

"Yes, she is," Mulder said, smiling through his tears, before he engulfed them all in a hug.

~*~

After breakfast, a new bag of cephalosporin was brought in by the infirmary Kurt. The clones in general seemed wary of Mulder, although the infirmary Kurt had relaxed enough to get within striking distance of Mulder when bringing in the new medication. After Mulder and Hannah settled down to watch some _Sesame Street_ , Scully went in search of the Kurt with whom she'd spent much of the previous day.

Scully wondered how on Earth she was going to distinguish one clone from the other politely, but she was saved the embarrassment when she was approached by a clone shortly after she crossed the threshold of the large lab across from the infirmary space.

"Agent Scully," the clone said, "I take it that you were able to resolve matters with Agent Mulder?"

"Yes," she answered. "Agent Mulder still has a number of questions, as do I." She noted that the clone's expression held a hint of worry behind its usual imperturbable façade. "Agent Mulder understands that you are not personally responsible for his gametes being stolen. Notwithstanding that fact, however, it remains a very upsetting issue for the both of us."

"I do see that," the clone said. "I cannot say that I truly comprehend it, but I do recognize that." He paused. "What did you wish to speak to me about? As yet, I don't have any answers for you on the bacteria colonies from the child's samples, but expect to within the next few hours. In my opinion, she is responding well to the treatment."

"Yes, she is," Scully answered. "And I thank you for looking after her last night in Agent Mulder's and my absence. We'll be remaining in the infirmary with Hannah until her situation is resolved, if that's all right with you."

The clone nodded. "Of course," he said.

"I did want to discuss your ideas about strengthening Hannah's immune system," she said. "It appeared to me from Agent Mulder's description that the facility she was discovered in was maintained as a sterile environment. I wondered if you have any knowledge of that."

"I wouldn't characterize it as sterile," the clone said, "but it was certainly restricted. My understanding is that the children were in an environment that limited their exposure to microbes, probably for the purpose of getting the most pure response to the virus. The staff took precautions to not expose the children to any elements outside the room. In fact, until Agent Mulder removed this last child from the facility, it's doubtful that any of the children had ever been in an unrestricted environment." He paused. "Her relative health given the limitations that she was raised under is actually a testament to how robust her innate immune system is."

"Are you saying that you don't think Hannah is going to require gene therapy to boost her immune system as we discussed yesterday?" Scully asked, surprised.

"That is unknown at this time. It would be my recommendation that the child be given the standard immunizations that she should have received up until this point. It would be preferable that the process be done in a controlled environment such as this, once she has truly recovered from this current infection. Her response to the introduction of those new elements into her system will give us a more accurate picture of how well her immune system is functioning."

"You seem to have made a large shift in your opinion since yesterday evening," Scully said. "Does this have anything to do with Agent Mulder's display of anger?"

The clone blinked once, then again. Scully had the impression that he was insulted by her question, but he answered her. "Agent Mulder told some of my brothers that he took Hannah into a mall after he found her."

She nodded.

"A mall," the clone said firmly, "with hundreds of people and millions of microbes to which she'd never before been exposed. The fact that she isn't deathly ill, considering the circumstances of her early life, makes the case for her immune resilience."

Scully shook her head in thought. "I hadn't actually considered it from that perspective," she said. "I'd assumed that she'd gotten ill from that exposure, of course, but never considered that she actually withstood more contagion than she was exposed to. She may be more like her father than I'd suspected," she mused.

Off Kurt's questioning look, she continued. "Agent Mulder and I have worked in close quarters for a number of years," she said. "And over that time, I've observed that his susceptibility to illness is strikingly low. For example, our offices were changed from a small space in which just the two of us worked, to a large room where more than fifty agents worked. During the weeks following the move, I spent much time fighting illness. Agent Mulder did not show any signs of illness."

"Intriguing," the clone said. "Do you know if either of his parents showed this same capacity?"

Scully shrugged. "I have no idea," she paused. "I could ask Agent Mulder, but can't see how that would aid you."

"I admit that the question is purely one of curiousity, considering how it is that the colonizing virus replicates," the clone paused. "Agent Mulder's resistance to that virus is unprecedented, as you know, but we had not considered that his microbial resistance in general might be high."

Scully nodded. "I see. You realize, of course, that immunity is considered to be an acquired human trait."

"I concede that is the general understanding, but if humans can inherit predispositions toward certain immune syndromes from mutated genetic material they inherit from their parents, the reverse postulate should also be entertained," the clone said. "In fact, it may go a long way toward explaining the function of this so-called natural immunity which you brought up yesterday. There must be a genetic explanation for such an ability."

"You think this might be a fruitful research avenue as far as your vaccine work is concerned?" Scully asked. She had to admit that she was intrigued by the notion.

"I cannot foresee its ultimate worth," the clone said, "but it certainly appears to be worth investigating."

Scully nodded, thinking. "I believe that I may speak for Agent Mulder in this case. If we can assist you by giving you genetic samples for you to study, we're willing to do so."

"That offer is appreciated," the clone said, "and I accept it. Did you have any other matters you wished to discuss?"

"Yes," Scully answered. "I have concerns about how Hannah was created. You have referred to the recombination of human and alien DNA as being unstable a number of times; your brothers made mention of that to Agent Mulder as well. I want to understand what implications that will have for Hannah in the long-term," she said. "In addition, I'm concerned that if we stay here for the length of time that it will take to inoculate Hannah successfully, we'll be putting your operation at significant risk."

"The first answer is more complex, and one I'm not sure that we can answer easily without doing a more in-depth analysis of how exactly the child's genome was altered," the clone said. "That will require some time and more information than has been found so far in the records Agent Mulder procured. As to the second part of your statement, I'm not sure I understand how you and Agent Mulder would be putting this operation at-risk," the clone said.

"I have an implant," Scully said levelly. "Agent Mulder and I are not aware of the breadth of what it can do, but I do know that if we continue to stay out of sight, the chances of me being called via it will rise."

"I'm sorry, Agent Scully," the clone said, "I should have mentioned this yesterday. We broadcast a dampening signal around this building. Your implant cannot be activated within a radius of 4 square miles."

"What implications does that have for my health?" she asked.

"None in the short term," the clone answered. "The implant is essentially a micro-transmitter and receiver that can only be removed by a tool that transmits an appropriate signal. Removal of the implant without that device provoked the broadcast of a malevolent electronic impulse that began the process of cancer replication in your nasopharyngeal cavity. When an implant was resituated and began receiving electronic impulses from their systems, it halted and reversed the process."

"But they won't be able to locate me," she said. "Won't that make them suspicious?"

"Perhaps," the clone answered, "but there are many sites that are dampened. It will take time for them to figure out which of the many sites you're at."

"I admit that I don't know how the implant works, but I can't imagine that scenario to be likely," she argued. "If word gets out that Mulder and I are missing, I'd assumed that they'd be able to work backward from the last place my signature was recorded at. Logically, the nearest dampened site would be the first place to search."

The clone seemed to be giving her answer serious thought. "We can transmit our data, disassemble necessary laboratory equipment and move within a twelve-hour period. We've had to do so before. Do you know if your absence has raised such an alarm?"

She looked at her watch. "Agent Mulder should be checking in with some of our allies to see if the trail they planted to cover our absence has worked. We expect to know that answer in a few hours."

The clone nodded. "I'll tell my brothers to prepare, just in case." She stepped aside to give him room to pass her, but the clone didn't move. "There is one other thing that you should consider, Agent Scully."

She nodded, encouraging the clone to continue.

"We have the removal tool here. If you desire it, we can safely remove their implant and free you from their machinations."

~*~

Scully followed the sound of Mulder's raised voice through the hallway that led to the loading zone of the warehouse, not surprised to find him in the relatively unused area. Hannah had told her that "Daddy got a call from a man he told me to call 'creepy Uncle Melvin', and had to go away because he was scaring the Doctor Kurt," before she continued on with her coloring.

Mulder was gesturing largely across the room, still unaware of her presence. "That's not even a question, Frohike."

He paused. 

"I'm telling you that I know it, and that should be good enough," he said heatedly. "10 years, Melvin." 

He paced as he listened. "Yeah, well the point is that I want to know who did this – I need to know who did this to us. Every single one of them, and you can start with Jonathan Buckley, M.D., the quack that had me ingesting the black oil."

"l-e-y," he paused. "I have no idea. Wait, I remember that his diploma said that he graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School," he rubbed his forehead, "1956. And don't forget Dr. Scanlon. All the information I've got on him is in the file. You have the back-up for that, except for the update on my home computer." He made a face. "Whatever, Langly. And then there's that ratfucker CGB Spender. I know he walked away from the flambé at El Rico. I need to find the hole he slithered into. I owe him. I figure we'll be even in about twenty-five years."

He paced, walking in tight circles. "Last, I don't have any of the information with me that I took from the day after," he paused, and then continued. "Where was Diana Fowley in the fall of 1994?" 

He sighed. "Could you just look it up, Frohike?"

"I'm not sure Scully would appreciate me telling you," he said. The hand he'd been gesturing with braced itself against his hip. "Scully does not keep secrets from me!" he said indignantly, and she found herself hiding a smile at his blatant lie. The thing was, he seemed convinced that he was telling the truth.

"Eventually, we tell each other everything," he insisted.

"Yes, we do, Frohike," he said through gritted teeth and paused. "That is none of your business." He made an exasperated noise and then listened for a few seconds before saying, "Because Scully thinks that she was there in the train car, that's why," in a dark tone.

"Guys?" Mulder pulled the phone away from his ear to see if the call had been dropped. "Cheap piece of … " he muttered, "Guys? Oh, you are there." He listened. "Of course, I believe her!" he yelled. "She would never say something like that if it wasn't true!"

He listened again, "Because I want to know where she was, Frohike. I want to know what her assignment," he spat the word out, "was." There was another, longer pause, and then Mulder said, "I promise you -- I swear on Samantha's grave -- if she did this to us, if she participated in any way in what they did to Scully then she will be first up against the fucking wall!" His voice had been rising steadily in volume and anger as he spoke. "First!" 

She had been walking toward him, but his outburst stunned her into immobility. She stopped and leant against an empty desk as Mulder's words swirled around in her head. Scully couldn't believe that he actually meant that he'd kill her, but the tone of his voice told her exactly how furious he was at Diana Fowley. In a sick way, his words, crude as they were, were a declaration of love for her more powerful than any promise of forever.

He paused again, "Thank you, Byers. Listen, I have to go back, Hannah's still freaked out because of last night and I don't want to leave her alone for too long."

Mulder hung up without saying goodbye, only to turn around and come face-to-face with her. All forward momentum on his part ceased, and he ran a hand through his hair, hard. The tips of his ears turned red. "Scully," he said, in an embarrassed tone, "How long have you been there?"

"Long enough," she answered him thoughtfully. She held out a hand to him, and he crossed the distance between them a bit warily, and took her hand. She motioned for his other hand, and he dropped the phone into the pocket of his shirt before he gave it to her. 

She tugged on his hands until she pulled him into the space between her legs. She regarded his hands, running her thumb over his friend's wedding ring, remembering how painful it had been to her to see Diana Fowley holding his hand months ago. "First up against the wall, Mulder?" 

"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," he said sheepishly. He was definitely blushing. "When the revolution comes." 

"Are we going to lead that revolution, Mulder?" She kissed his hand and smiled up at him, watching the slow smile break over his face as her words sunk in. She opened her hands and pressed her palms against him while he mirrored her movements. She linked their fingers together, pushing Mulder's hands towards him until he resisted her.

He was nodding before he spoke, "About time, don't you think?" He pressed back against her and they balanced somewhere in the middle, meeting for a kiss. After a few minutes, he drew back from her with a questioning expression on his face. "What's up, Scully?" he asked.

His intuition was really quite striking – she had to admit it. 

"I have some things to tell you," she began, and immediately, his brow creased in worry. She raised their still linked hands and ran a finger over the lines, smoothing them away. "No," she said, "for once, Mulder, it's not anything bad."

~*~ 

She was curled on her side trying to focus on Possession when Mulder came out of the bathroom wearing his pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. He grinned at the sight. 

"Finally!" he said, carefully climbing up onto their makeshift double bed. She'd taught him an old resident's trick – they pushed two of the empty beds in the infirmary together and locked their brakes in place before they lay the mattresses across the bed frames to cover the seam between the two beds. With extra pillows to cover the top of the bed where there was a gap, they'd made a passably comfortable Queen-sized bed, although she had her doubts that Mulder would keep to his own side of it. Hannah slept on her own in the bed next to them, her tiger tucked up under her chin. 

She raised her eyebrows in response to his comment, looking at him over her shoulder as he curled up against her back. "After everything that's happened in the last twenty-four hours, it's me reading this book that provokes that outburst?" She made a disbelieving noise, and returned to her reading. 

He kissed the back of her neck very gently. "Scully, I'm surprised at you. Are you trying to provoke an unseemly display in front of a minor? Our minor, I'd like to add."

"I don't think that hat with the light would fit over her hair, Mulder," she said, putting her finger in the book to mark her page. She could hear him wincing behind her.

"Scully, we really have got to work on your sense of humor," he deadpanned. "Maybe I can buy you one for your birthday?" 

"Last month," she noted dryly. 

"Who says we need to be pedestrian and give and receive presents on the actual day?" Mulder said archly. "What about the element of surprise?"

She huffed a laugh and then regretted it, feeling an ache deep in her belly.

"You OK?" he asked tenderly. "Need another icepack?"

She moved the nearly melted one off her abdomen and handed it to him, turning gingerly over onto her back so that she could see him. "I'm not even sure that it's doing anything other than easing my mind," she said. "There's no way that ice on my skin could help inflammation in my ovaries."

Mulder smiled at her. "Mind over matter, Scully."

She harrumphed.

"Do you want another?" She laid a cold hand against his chest and he shivered, but didn't shy away from her. "Just keep that hand north of the border, I beg of you." He began rubbing her cold hand in both of his desperately. 

She laughed this time, and immediately moaned, causing Mulder to grimace. 

"What does it feel like?" he asked. 

She thought it over for a bit. "It feels really weird," she finally said. "It's not exactly painful, but it's very strange to be aware of a part of your body that you knew was there, but have never really felt before."

He nodded. "You never had mittelschmerz before?"

"Not that I recall," Scully said wryly. "Besides, that's only supposed to be affect one ovary at a time." She paused. "Exactly how much reading have you done on this subject, Mulder?" He was a dangerous man with a search engine.

"On ova regeneration, or on mittelschmerz?" he asked. 

She thumped him with her still cold hand, and he laughed, capturing it.

"You're going to have to write an article for me to read on the first," he said, "and I had a girlfriend at Oxford who had mittelschmerz." 

"Phoebe?" she asked. There was no longer any need for her to hide her distaste.

"Phoebe was a pain in a different part of the anatomy," Mulder answered, raising her hand to kiss it, while she smiled at him. "Now, really, how do you feel about all of this?" 

"Sore," she answered.

Mulder made a face at her and waited.

"I'm glad, Mulder," she said. "On one level, I can't believe that they could regenerate my ova with the implant, but if the implant could cause healthy cells to become cancerous and then spontaneously remit, then it's not that unbelievable, relatively speaking." She made a face, listening to what she was saying aloud. "I guess."

Mulder waited for her to continue. 

"I'm still not sure that I believe it, despite the discomfort," she said. "I'm going to have to confirm it with my own doctor." She gripped his hand. "I think maybe I'm afraid to count on it too much. If I could have a baby," she began, "should I?" They'd both been keeping their voices low, so as not to disturb Hannah, but her tone had taken on a note of urgency. "I worry that we won't be able to keep Hannah safe," she whispered. "How could we keep another child safe? How do we know that Scanlon won't to try to take Hannah, or any other child we might have?"

Mulder's eyes were hard at her words. "I will kill him where he stands," he said. 

"Mulder," she said.

"I'm serious," he said.

"I know you are," she answered him. "But you can't help keep her safe if you're in jail! We need to figure out how we're going to protect her," she said. Behind her, Hannah coughed and Scully's head jerked in the direction of the sound. Her hand flew out of Mulder's grasp and went to the back of her neck as Mulder winced. 

He got out of the bed carefully and padded over to peer at Hannah, who had roused a bit. 

Scully had rolled onto her back, still holding onto her neck. Mulder gave Hannah a sip of water through a straw and waited for a second, making sure she was settled before he returned to his side of their bed. "She didn't really wake up," he whispered. "Do you need an ice pack for your neck while I'm up?" 

She started to shake her head, but thought better of it. "It's fine," she said, and then rolled her eyes at Mulder's expression. "Really, Mulder. I've had much worse. It's a tiny burn." She had turned back on her side to face him.

"The laser that came out of that … thing," Mulder said, getting back under the covers and sliding over next to her, "was one of the stranger things I've seen."

She agreed with him. "It was so cold – it didn't hurt at all while it was happening, but now I feel it when I turn my head too fast." She changed the subject. "What did Byers say?"

"He wasn't back yet," Mulder answered, "but Frohike said he'd called in to say that Skinner had showed up at the meeting and that he'd agreed to verify the paper trail if asked. So far, no one has been looking for us."

"Where does the 302 say we are?" she asked. 

"In California," Mulder answered, "following up on leads related to the El Rico massacre. Langly and Frohike moved your car from the mall parking lot to BWI, and the plane manifest shows that you flew out of there on Sunday evening."

"With you?"

"No," Mulder answered. "I flew out of there on Saturday morning."

"So if Scanlon is looking for Hannah," she said, "he'll look there first?"

"If the reproductive experiments are in as much trouble as the Kurts think they are, Scanlon has bigger problems than losing Hannah," Mulder said. "Besides, it sounds like the whole program is in disarray with factions fighting for supremacy since the burnings."

"We can't just trust that she'll be safe, Mulder," she insisted.

"I have no intention of doing so," he said heatedly. 

She pressed her hand against his chest in apology. 

He calmed down and continued on in a softer voice. "I have an idea," he said. "But it's going to require a lot of coordination, and a little time."

"Tell me," she said. 

Mulder drew in a long breath through his nose and covered her hand with his. "We're going to have to lie," he said. 

"Fine," she answered. 

Mulder looked at her skeptically.

"Mulder," she said, "she's our daughter. I'll do what's necessary." 

He looked faintly surprised. 

"I asked nicely with Emily," she said, "and look where that got me. If she'd lived," she fought off the wave of bitterness, "they wouldn't have awarded her to me. What's your plan?" She was ready to poke holes in it.

"We could do this a couple of ways," Mulder said. "But basically, the first thing we need to do is to raise our profile and Hannah's to make it so that any further action against any of us would be a disaster for whatever factions remain active."

Scully was surprised to hear him set the tone for this discussion in that way. In general, Mulder preferred to keep a low profile. Back in the days when Patterson had been trying to groom him as his second-in-command, Mulder had resisted being paraded in front of the press – it had been one of their first and most persistent disagreements. "Go on," she encouraged him. 

Mulder took a long breath in. "We could say that you were pregnant when you were kidnapped, and that they kept you just long enough for the baby to be viable. We make the case that Hannah was kept as leverage by the people who were burned at El Rico. We charge Strugholm and a few of the others that are dead with conspiracy and kidnapping, of both you and Hannah," he was watching her carefully. "And we charge Spender and Scanlon specifically with attempted murder charges against you, both for when you were kidnapped in 1994 and almost killed, and for Scanlon's treatment of your cancer."

She blinked at his audacity. "They would both die in jail," she said slowly. 

"They'll probably die before they get to trial, Scully," he said. "If we can even find them in the first place. But we get their names, and most importantly, their faces on the Ten Most Wanted. There's bound to be publicity about the case, making it so they can't take Hannah without giving credence to the whole kidnapping story."

She had to admit that she was impressed with the idea, even though there were a tremendous number of moving parts to it. She started to ask him a question, when Mulder held up his hand. 

"But Scully, if we do it this way, then people are going to feel validated in every rotten thing they've ever said about us and about our relationship. The Bureau may even try to go after us for fraternization. We could be destroying both our careers."

"I don't care about that," she said. "Really, Mulder. How else are we going to explain Hannah's sudden appearance?"

"We could say that your ova were stolen when you were kidnapped and that she was created …"

"No," she said firmly. 

"Scully, your reputation …" he began.

"No," she said. "Your first idea was the better one, even if it's sketchy, and you know it. Why are you balking?" 

He shook his head in frustration. "The idea that some of those bastards we work with will talk about you, the way I know they'll talk about you, makes me crazy. Saying that we've been in a relationship all these years just validates all the sexist bullshit that they spout about male-female partnerships."

"Mulder," she said affectionately. "I really think you're kidding yourself by believing that they don't talk about me, about us, that way already. Just because they'll believe that they're justified doesn't make any difference to me. I would never have lasted as long as I have at the Bureau if I didn't have a thick skin."

Mulder looked distinctly grumpy. "Well," he said, "Frohike had an idea: he said that he can make it look like we've been secretly married since 1994. We're already going to have to alter your hospital records to make it look like you had given birth before you were returned. He insists that he can make it look legit."

She laughed out loud, sore gut be damned. "Mulder! And you think _that_ would cause less gossip!?" She was touched, but not truly surprised, by Frohike's chivalrous impulses toward her.

He looked even more grumpy at her laughing at him. 

"That would become the whole story, Mulder, and would make it more scintillating – we need the focus to remain on the crimes that took place," she said. "Besides, how would we explain that to my mother?"

Mulder looked distinctly uncomfortable at her words.

"Is that what this is all about?" she asked him incredulously. "You're afraid that my mother will be angry because I was pregnant without being married?" She narrowed her eyes and really looked at him. "Or angry with you for making me pregnant?"

Mulder had the good sense to look chagrinned at her words. "Scully – I know that she's going to have an opinion about it."

"Oh, she definitely will," Scully said, "and I'll make it clear to her that her opinion is duly noted, and then continue on with my life." Mulder looked dubious at her words. "Mulder, trust me -- she's more likely to be angry that she didn't know that I was pregnant, or that I had a kidnapped daughter, than she is about me being pregnant without being married!" 

"Well, that's another issue," Mulder said. "How are you going to explain this to your mother?"

"I'll tell her that we didn't know there was a baby, because it was so early in the pregnancy. I could tell her that until Emily was found that the possibility of our child being alive had never occurred to me and that we began actively looking for her. The problem will be in how to explain who Emily was," she mused. "I've already told my mother that because of what they did to me when I was kidnapped that I couldn't have children."

She heard Mulder hesitating, and she looked up at him. "I will not disavow Emily, Mulder," she said firmly. "I know that the easiest thing would be to say that Emily's appearance was a blind, meant to hide Hannah – that we were getting too close because of ongoing investigations and that they panicked and tried to fool us, but I won't do that." 

Mulder leaned forward and kissed her forehead, and then her cheek. "I didn't think you would," he said, running his fingers through her hair. "What if we said that Emily and Hannah were twins?" he asked. She started at the suggestion. "Who is going to challenge us or correct the information we put out?" he asked. "The consortium? You can tell your mother that I've been suspicious since Emily was found, and that I never stopped investigating, but that I didn't tell you about it, because I didn't want to get your hopes up."

She stared at him. "You'd do that?"

Mulder looked confused. "Scully, I would have been looking all this year if you hadn't put down the edict against it."

"No," she said quietly, "you'd really claim Emily?" Mulder actually looked a little hurt at her words, so she squeezed his hand and whispered, "Thank you," before she kissed him. 

Mulder relaxed against her, gathering her into his arms carefully. "Don't thank me, Scully," he said when they broke apart. "I should have said something at the time."

She placed her fingers against his lips. "You're saying it now," she countered. "It still counts, as far as I'm concerned." She lay there thinking for a moment, her head on Mulder's shoulder, her hand smoothing over the cotton of his t-shirt. "The problem with that is that we don't run to twins in my family, Mulder," she said. 

"Not even Irish twins?" Mulder teased. 

She poked him, but she was smiling. 

"Actually, I had twin uncles," he said. 

"Had?" Scully asked.

"My father's older brothers," he said. "One of them died before I was born – WWII," he explained. "The other one died shortly after I finished Oxford." 

"Dare I ask what their names were?" Scully asked, looking up at Mulder. 

His expression was pained. "Forbes," he said finally. "And Brooks."

"Brooks?" Scully asked. 

Mulder covered his face with his right hand. "It's a last name, Scully," he said. "In this case, one of my paternal grandmother's family names."

"Not that Forbes is much better," she muttered.

"Oh, Forbes-y was all right," Mulder said, clenching his jaw and affecting an upper-class accent. "Never quite right after losing his brother in the war, you know, but still a good man."

"Your relatives would be horrified that you've chosen to breed with the help, Mulder," she said. 

"Fuck 'em," Mulder answered. 

'No, thanks,' Scully thought, but kept her mouth shut. "Going back to the plan," she said, "the big problem I see is that my kidnapper was Duane Barry." 

"No," Mulder answered, "he was the one who took you, but he delivered you to unknown others – which reminds me – don't let me forget to put Krycek on the Ten Most Wanted," he sounded gleeful at the prospect. "The actual file on the conspiracy surrounding your kidnapping has never been closed, and the contents relating to your medical condition when you appeared at the hospital were classified as 'need-to-know'."

She startled at this information. "But I read ..."

"You 'needed to know'," Mulder said sarcastically. "I'm sure that Cancerman pressured Skinner, or probably Blevins, to classify it because they knew that exposure to the virus was what had branched your DNA, but it'll work in our favor now. They'll never be able to prove that what we're saying isn't true without revealing how they know."

"But the original information, the paper files –" she said.

"Frohike says he can take care of that," Mulder said.

She raised her eyebrows at him. 

"I told him not to tell me how," Mulder said. "I suggest you don't ask, either."

"Plausible deniability?" 

"It works for them," Mulder answered.

"What if the Bureau balks?" she asked.

"I'm expecting them to," Mulder said. "I can't believe that Blevins was the only one in league with Cancerman, not to mention the fact that we're implicating two ex-FBI agents in your kidnapping and the subsequent kidnapping of our two children." 

She felt herself flush at the easy manner in which Mulder had adopted  
Emily, but he continued on. "The Director's Office isn't going to be too happy about the scandal this whole situation is going to cause, and if we went to them first, they'd definitely try to squelch the whole thing," he said. "That's why we're not going to them first."

"Who are we going to?" she asked, puzzled. 

"Matheson," Mulder answered. "His position on the Intelligence Committee gives him the clout we need. My plan is to get him to contact the Director just before we get back and make it clear that the story here is how the FBI has uncovered the long-term results of a corruption scandal that has already implicated a Section Chief. The only thing I can't figure out is how to work Jeffrey Spender's disappearance into this."

She was surprised to hear him say as much, and knew that her expression reflected that.

"I keep thinking about what you said about him, about what kind of a chance he had because of who his father was. I think I understand him more than I did before." Mulder paused. "Besides, I owe him that much for his support. And I figure there has to be some way to make it look like Baby Spender set us on the trail to find Hannah. That way, I can put out an APB on Diana as a person of interest with regard to his disappearance and Hannah's discovery."

"Mulder –" 

"She's still alive," Mulder said surely, "and there are a lot of questions that she needs to answer." His voice was hard, but level.

She decided not to press the issue any further, since she knew that Fowley's betrayal was still a sore subject with Mulder. "Still, the question remains – what are we implying that the conspirators were doing?" Scully asked. 

"As far as what the press gets told, we emphasize the corruption angle, implying that Hannah was kept as a hostage to ensure that if we got too close, we could be stopped. I'm sure that when the press digs, they'll find out more about what it is that we do, and they'll have more questions, which is fine by me. Especially since I'm going to have Samantha declared dead." 

She looked up at him in surprise. "Do you think your mother will let you do that?" she asked.

"I'm not asking for permission," Mulder said tightly. "If what the Kurts say is true, then both my parents have lied to me, not just my father."

"Mulder," Scully said, "you don't know if that's true. You don't know what your mother knows."

"And she will never tell me," Mulder said darkly. "I've been thinking about my parent's arguments, the way they escalated in the months before Samantha was taken," he paused. "I think about her taking me to the doctor's office, and how on edge she always was. That was when she started taking pills. She's always known a lot more than she's ever been willing to tell me. They were both a part of this."

Scully wrapped her arm around him, thinking. She couldn't imagine what kind of forces would have compelled Mulder's mother to capitulate to the Consortium, how she could have stood over Mulder every day for months, watching while he took his 'iron pill'. She and her mother had always had markedly different opinions on a number of things, but she had never once questioned the fact that her mother would never do anything to physically harm her. She knew, deep in her bones, that her mother would do exactly the opposite, that she would do anything to ensure her children would not be harmed. As Scully herself knew that she would do anything for Hannah. "I'll never understand these people, Mulder," she said, her voice was harsh with sorrow. 

"My parents?" Mulder asked.

"All of them," she said. "Kurt's parents and grandparents, Spender. Strughold. How they could choose between their children, deciding which one would die so the others could live? What kind of a person can make that choice?"

" Sophie's Choice," Mulder said. 

"And she lost both her children," Scully said. She couldn't help but think of the children she'd never known, Hannah's sisters, Emily's clones, the nameless girls from the F and G series, all taken from her, and sacrificed on the altar of a vast and failed medical experiment. 

Mulder wrapped both of his arms around her. "That will not happen to us, Scully. We're going to keep Hannah safe."

She closed her eyes and said a prayer that he was right. 

When she spoke again, after silence had claimed the room except for Hannah's snuffles, he startled at her voice. "Are you sure that Senator Matheson will help us, Mulder?"

She could feel him nodding above her. 

"Lindsay will make sure of it," he answered her. "Frohike's setting up a clean call tomorrow so that I can let her know what's going on. She'll help us, Scully." He had begun playing with the rings on her left hand as he spoke. He bent and kissed her forehead, and then lifted her chin so he could see her. "You never asked me about your rings," he said.

"I just assumed they were Lindsay's," she said, wondering at the expression on his face.

"No, Scully," he said. "They're your rings."

"My rings?" she echoed.

"Yes," he said quietly. "When you were sick …" she sucked in a breath, "I bought them then. I thought that if I had them, they would be a hedge against a future without you."

She stared at him, thinking how his friend Dean's ring had provided no such protection. 

He shrugged, "I know it was stupid, but I bought them anyway."

A thought occurred to her, "Were these what you came back to DC to get?"

He nodded. "When I found Hannah, I knew that she was yours. I thought that I could prove to you that I was committed to this, to you." He shook his head, ruefully "but then when you got to us, nothing went like I had pictured it. It just … didn't." 

She held her hand up and stared at her rings. 

"I should have given them to you a different way," he whispered. "I should have asked you when you got better."

She propped herself up on his chest and looked down at him. "I thought you asked me yesterday," she said softly. 

He shook his head at her. "There should have been candles," he said. "A nice dinner, first." She smiled at his wistful sentiments. "And what are we going to tell Hannah when she asks about how I asked you?"

She smiled at him, then took her rings off and handed them back to him. "Ask me now," she said.

"Let me just get up –" 

She shook her head, pressing him back against the bed. "No," she said. 

He looked up at her, his mouth twitching to hold back a smile. 

"What?" she asked.

"It's just interesting that you're on top for this conversation," he said. 

"Just think of it as a post-modern twist on being down on one knee, Mulder," she said, smiling down at him. "Quit stalling."

"I think I'm nervous," he confessed. "Is that stupid? Because you already said yes, didn't you, Scully?" His eyes were searching hers, his fingers rubbing the empty space where her rings had resided for the past few days. "Scully?"

She smiled enigmatically. 

Mulder closed his eyes and blew out a breath. When he opened them, he looked her right in the eye. "Dana Katherine Scully," he said, "I love you more than anything else in this world. Please say that you'll marry me and be my family." He lifted her hand and kissed her ring finger. 

She smiled down at him. "Yes," she said succinctly.

"Yes," he said, but there was a question in his tone.

"Yes," she said. 

"That's all I get?" he complained.

She rolled her eyes. "You know that I love you, Mulder. You've been my family for a long time now. I'll be proud to stand up in front of the whole world and declare that you and I and Hannah are a family." She leant forward gingerly, careful not to strain her abdomen and Mulder leant up to meet her kiss. "Yes," she whispered against his mouth. 

When she pulled back, Mulder was smiling at her through the tears in his eyes. He kissed her rings, one by one. "I knew they were lucky," he said triumphantly. 

She laughed at him, then winced at the twinge in her belly. 

Mulder shifted in the bed so that she could lay on her side. He picked up her ring finger, and then looked at her before he began to slide the wedding band onto her finger. 

"Oh," she said, "Mulder, you need to hold onto that one for the wedding."

"Right," he muttered. He jammed the ring onto his pinkie finger after staring at it for a second. "It looks better on you," he said critically. He slid the engagement ring onto her finger and looked at it for a few seconds, before he bent his head and kissed her hand again. "Now, we're official," he said, holding onto her hand.

"Kiss me, Mulder," she said and he smiled before he applied himself to the task thoroughly, kissing her like she was everything in the world that he'd ever wanted. When they broke apart regretfully, recognizing their fundamental lack of privacy in their current circumstances, she was breathless and flushed and Mulder was no better. "Rain check," she said, fighting to control her respiration. 

"Oh, yeah," Mulder said, rolling away from her. 

They lay there side by side, chests heaving, staring at each other. 

"Scully," Mulder said conversationally. "Where'd you put that ice pack?"

She laughed and rolled onto her side, away from him. "G'night, Mulder," she said.

"It could be better," he muttered, then curled up behind her, tenderly kissing her neck once more. "Good night, Scully."

~*~ 

May 9, 1999

In the end, it was four weeks from the day that Mulder ditched her to when they finally returned to the Hoover Building.

Their time away hadn't just been about refining their plans, however. An additional complication had manifested itself in the form of the nanites that Assistant Director Skinner bore in his bloodstream. Ten days after their disappearance, Skinner suffered another, more brazen attack and was hospitalized and in critical condition for three days. When the Gunmen were able to arrange for one of their allies to get to him, he was adamant that he be left alone and not be told any information regarding Mulder and Scully's whereabouts. The nurse supervisor who'd made contact with Skinner had had a sister who died of nasopharyngeal cancer after frequent disappearances in their youth. She arranged for a blood sample of Skinner's to be diverted into the Gunmen's hands for further study. She also reported that during one of his worst attacks that the Assistant Director had been muttering something that sounded like a Slavic swear, a word that ended in 'check'. This information was dutifully reported to Mulder and Scully, and redoubled Mulder's determination to get Krycek's name and face on the Ten Most Wanted.

When Skinner's attack had occurred, he'd been on his way to a rendezvous with Mulder and Scully. As far as the FBI knew, he had been en route to California for a face-to-face progress report. In reality, he would have been meeting Mulder at the airport in Chicago to hand over a small case full of pediatric vaccines, procured by the Gunmen, before continuing on to California for his 'meeting'. This time, however, his seizure in the main lobby of the Hoover was witnessed by a number of Agents and other Bureau personnel. Skinner had always had a reputation as a tough but fair Assistant Director. He worked hard, and he expected excellence from his teams, but he was perceived as a straight shooter and a boss whose ambition did not outweigh his talent. The Agents who had seen him fall, his veins bulging and skin ominously and unusually darkened, knew that the official line that Skinner had had an angina attack didn't add up. 

The fact that he was on his way to meet the equally absent and always mysterious Agents Mulder and Scully only added fuel to the fire; a murmuring in the building about biological attacks and dirty tricks began, and no matter how the official statement to the rank and file was phrased to counter such impressions, the rumors did not stop. Of course, it didn't help matters that such communications were coming through Assistant Director Kersh, who had never commanded the level of respect that Skinner had among the rank and file. When Skinner had been in charge of the X-Files, it was noted, Mulder and Scully had taken their share of lumps. In the brief period when Kersh had been in charge, however, both of the newly-assigned Agents had gone missing in a matter of months. The puddle of Agent Spender's blood had not been forgotten. In a building full of trained, elite hunters, hard questions began to be asked, if only covertly. 

Of course, Scully had her own questions. Mostly, they were about the accuracy of Frohike's sources within the Hoover Building, although she had to allow that she'd witnessed Agents being far from discreet. Their time in the bullpen had been highly informative in that regard – she'd been shocked to see that Agents would routinely leave sensitive information in full view on their desks during their breaks or even overnight. They thought nothing of having candid discussions about cases, not to mention office gossip, in the full hearing of anyone who happened to be in the area, Agents or not. The news of the rumors might have been exaggerated, but there was probably a kernel of truth in it. At the very least, she knew that Kersh was generally loathed by the Agents in the bullpen, who considered him more loyal to those in power, and fueled by his own ambition to rise to their level, than to the ethos that was supposed to rule the Bureau. 

With Skinner incapacitated, Frohike had brought the vaccines himself when he'd arrived for a brief visit the day after the aborted meeting. Scully had her suspicions that Frohike had come to check up on her, which she kept to herself. Frohike had still seemed angry with Mulder when he first arrived, but had changed his behavior abruptly when he saw the effect his attitude was having on Hannah. Hannah's attachment to Mulder was both sincere and obvious, and Mulder never made any effort to discourage that affection, and every effort to encourage it between Hannah and Scully. Hannah's confusion and upset at Frohike's manner, in concert with Mulder's tender solicitude toward both Hannah and herself, had gone a long way toward breaking the tension between the two long-time comrades-in-arms. 

In truth, it was probably Hannah herself who changed Frohike's opinion. It had taken Hannah less than 48 hours to make a conquest of her 'Uncle Fro'. Scully knew that she was biased, but Hannah was a charming and loving child – the neglect in her early life almost ensured that she would be responsive to those who showed her affection. Happily, she'd also proven to have her own powers of discernment about people. Scully was constantly amazed at Hannah's ability to distinguish individuals amongst the clones that surrounded them at Prometheus. With the addition of Frohike to the mix, Hannah's happiness at making a new friend was contagious, and Frohike was helpless to resist. 

The afternoon he left them to return to DC, she'd found Frohike in the warehouse playing hopscotch with Hannah, on a court that Mulder had painted for Hannah on the floor. Mulder was sitting at a nearby desk in front of her laptop, on the phone with his feet up, a bemused and slightly smug expression on his face. Before he left, Frohike had solemnly promised her that the Gunmen would do whatever was necessary to ensure that Hannah was safe. Scully had kissed Frohike on the cheek after he said it, touched at the value of his promise, and the both of them got a little misty-eyed. Frohike had broken away with a gruff, "I got to get on the road," accepted a hug from Hannah, and flinched away from Mulder, who had puckered up for his own kiss goodbye. He walked out the door of Prometheus disparaging Mulder's ancestry under his breath. 

Frohike's visit had also brought about an unforeseen alliance. He was fascinated with the clones in general, but had actually bonded with a number of them over discussing Skinner's nanite problem. Several of the Kurts were intrigued by the possible implications of the nanite technology, and much data had changed hands between the Gunmen's lair in Takoma Park and the Prometheus installations in Minnesota and elsewhere, as they posited methodologies for freeing Skinner. The Crawfords had a basic knowledge of the technology that had gone into the creation of the nanites, and their work in creating the dampening field around their own facilities had led to long discussions about high-altitude satellites, and radio waves and their roles in the implants, among other topics. A germ of an idea to aid Skinner began to take shape: until the nanites could be safely removed, a dampening device would be created to ensure that he would be free of the predation of whoever had implanted them in the first place. It was a stop-gap measure that showed great promise, although Frohike also seemed to be onboard with Mulder's idea of finding Krycek and beating the answers out of him, unfeasible as that seemed to be. 

The alliance between the clones and the elder Gunmen found common ground elsewhere. Since Mulder had first met the Crawfords in Allentown, they had eschewed any more public contact with MUFON or its membership out of fear of exposure. In so doing, however, they had also cut themselves off from the abductee community, losing both access to information and a pool of vaccinated humans. The Gunmen's ties within the abductee community however, gave them access to both with the promise of anonymity so that they could continue their work on the creation of a viable vaccine. It was ironic, but the failure of the alien/human hybridization program had proven what Mulder's father had argued all along: the only way that the human species would survive colonization was for immunity to be established via a working vaccine, or perhaps with gene therapy, if some of the clones' new avenues of research proved fruitful. Still, Scully could not help but mourn the fact that the theory had been proven only after the deaths of hundreds of abductees, and the sacrifice of an unknown number of children created to suffer unspeakable experimentation. 

The Crawfords' new working relationship with the Gunmen meant that when Mulder, Scully and Hannah finally left the Prometheus warehouse behind that first full week of April, their car was the first in a loose southerly bound caravan, all taking different routes. Prometheus had set up operations in an office park near the Gunmen in Takoma Park, and Scully suspected Mulder had used some of his inheritance to ensure that their research went forward. 

The day that they left the office park that had been their home for three weeks was clear and bright, and Scully felt a bit like Persephone, arising from the wintery gloom of the windowless warehouse into the spring. Of course, it had been hard to reconcile the vistas that first greeted them with the idea of spring. The sun shone brilliantly on the fields of white snow on the by-ways that led them to the highway. Scully had seen a robin on a split rail fence near one of the larger snowfields and excitedly pointed out the harbinger of spring to Hannah, while Mulder smiled at them both. Everywhere they drove, the snow was melting, even the hard mounds of salt-rimed and blackened snow that was piled along each roadside and corner. 

Hannah hadn't truly understood her mother's enthusiasm at the sight of the robin – her excitement stemmed from the fact that they were going somewhere else – she'd long since grown bored with the confining environment of the warehouse. She'd only been out in the real world for a tiny fraction of her life, but she was her grandfather's daughter, and couldn't resist the lure of exploration. Scully couldn't wait to take her out on the sea in the summer – she had visions of herself teaching her daughter to sail, to always reach for the horizon.

When they'd finally entered the DC limits, after two days of travel and innumerable games of I Spy, they'd gone directly to the Gunmen's to pick up Mulder's car, as well as appropriate work attire for them both. This also gave Langly and Byers an opportunity to meet Hannah. Langly deemed Hannah 'cool', but in Byers' wistfully soft smile as he spoke with Hannah, Scully saw a longing that didn't surprise her. She'd often wondered where the woman was that had given John Byers her ring to wear. She very much doubted that he had a family that he'd left behind, but it was clear that at some point, he'd had a hope of one. She knew that she and Mulder had received a miracle in the form of their daughter's life, and felt sorrow that her gentlemanly friend had so little hope of receiving a similar boon. 

They'd left the Gunmen and driven into the District just after lunch on a Friday. As they'd moved further and further south, the snow pack had receded and they'd been rewarded with the sight of nature softly retaking the barren earth, decorating it with greenery and delicate flowers. Scully had harbored a secret hope that their return would be in time to at least see some of the celebration of _sakura_ , the Cherry Blossom season in the District. Her dream had been realized when she cajoled Mulder into driving by the basin to find the trees just past their bloom but still glorious. Hannah had been wide-eyed at the sight, and they'd slowly driven along with the windows rolled down, letting the soft spring breezes awash with the scent of the flowers envelope them. Despite being nervous about being out in public with Hannah without a battalion of armed guards, Mulder couldn't resist Hannah's desire to see the blossoms up close. The image of Hannah, dancing in delight around her father while he broke off a flower for her as the cherry blossom petals rained down around them, was one that she would always treasure. 

Their time under the blossoms had been sadly abbreviated as they had appointments to keep at the Hoover Building. They had a private meeting scheduled with her mother before the press conference. Scully knew that her absence during Easter, and her silence during most of the previous month, meant that her mother would be quietly frantic with worry. She also knew that her mother would forgive her when she understood all that had occurred. Hannah's safety was paramount, and Scully couldn't trust that communication between her and her mother wouldn't be compromised, jeopardizing it. In addition, they'd needed every available hour of the day to not only put Mulder's plan into effect, but also to ensure that Hannah had some basic inoculations in her system before she was once more exposed to the wider world. Standard pediatric guidelines for uninoculated children of Hannah's age recommended giving her a vast number of shots at the same time, but Scully had been unwilling to do that, and Mulder had agreed with her decision. They'd been cautious, and so far Hannah had not had an adverse reaction to any of the shots that she'd had, other than a slight fever. 

Still, she could not help but regret the expression of pain and shock on her mother's face when she had seen Hannah for the first time. Their arrival on the floor where Skinner's office was located after such a long absence and with a child caused a buzz of activity. Of course, the presence of Senator Matheson in Skinner's office, and the rumors about the impending press conference, had caused enough discussion that her mother heard their names and opened the door to the conference room where she'd been waiting. She had immediately recognized Hannah for who she truly was, and her surprised expression of recognition had given credence to the stories that began circulating the building once the press conference was underway.

Once past her initial shock, however, Margaret Scully had accepted her new granddaughter right away. As Scully watched the two of them interacting now, she found it hard to remember the frank and angry conversations that she and her mother had had about her intransigence over clarifying her relationship with Hannah's father through the years. Her repeated mantra of "It's complicated, Mom," had been met with exasperation that had begun to fade as this day had gotten closer. She knew that her mother would never understand her true relationship with Mulder, and that she could never explain how exactly Hannah had come to be, but was pleased that her mother had finally begun to accept the answers that she'd been given. Just yesterday, Scully had overheard her mother sharply telling her brother Bill that it was entirely appropriate that there were things that Dana only shared with Mulder, just as there were things that he only shared with his own wife, and that he should mind his own business.

She smiled at the memory, and checked her lipstick one last time in the mirror. 

"You look beautiful," Hannah said to her worshipfully, and Scully smiled at her daughter. Hannah was dressed in a white dress that had a pale blue overlay, complementing the blue-toned white of Scully's own dress. In the month since they'd been back, Hannah's curls had been tamed with a more flattering haircut, and were now crowned with a circlet fashioned from the same flowers that Scully would carry. 

"So do you, pumpkin," Scully answered. "How's Daddy look?"

"He's beautiful, too," Hannah said seriously. 

"Oh, Hannah!" Margaret Scully exclaimed, pausing from where she'd been fussing with the back of Scully's hair to hide a smile, as her daughter laughed aloud. "Men aren't really beautiful," she explained, "but your dad does look very handsome." 

Hannah looked dubious at this pronouncement. "I don't know about handsome," she said skeptically, "my Daddy is beautiful."

"I agree," Scully answered, putting an end to her mother's protests. "Are we ready to go?" she asked her mother, looking at her in the mirror. At her mother's teary nod, Scully adjusted one of her mother's pearl and diamond earrings so that it sat correctly on her ear. Then she straightened the bow on the basket of flower petals before she handed it to Hannah.

"Now, that's a pretty picture," Frohike said from the doorway. 

Scully smiled. She'd seen Frohike push the door open, but her mother started, not having had heard him. 

"Hannah, just move a little bit closer to your mom," Frohike said, "And Mrs. Scully, please take one step forward." They did as he suggested, and then smiled at his urging. Scully's smile was a little larger than the others, due to her own happiness as much as to her amusement over the situation. Frohike certainly was taking his role as wedding photographer quite seriously. 

"Agent Scully," Byers said from the doorway, "we were just coming to tell you that we're all ready for you downstairs."

"Thank you," she said to Byers. Both he and Frohike were dressed in suits that complemented Mulder's own – even Langly had consented to wear a suit for this one occasion. "We'll be right down." 

"Thanks again for letting us commandeer Mother's Day, Mom," Scully said as she stood up, carefully smoothing her dress. She bent to straighten out Hannah's bow, which had gotten crushed when she'd pressed up against her mother to watch her wedding preparations.

"Don't thank me, Dana," her mother answered, "this day is as important to you now as it is to me." She fussed a bit more with Scully's hair, and Scully could see her biting her tongue. Scully knew that her mother would have preferred it if she'd consented to wear a veil, but she wasn't interested in wearing that, or a tiara, or even a crown of flowers like Hannah's. Aside from the fact that such an item wouldn't complement the sophisticated sleeveless sheath that she was wearing, it simply wasn't her. She was going to walk down the aisle to Mulder exactly as she was, albeit wearing a beautiful dress and carrying a beautiful bouquet of flowers, with Hannah and her mother as her attendants. Her brother Charles, home from wherever it was his latest secret assignment had taken him, was her official witness. He took great pride in referring to himself as the Maid of Honor, although he'd laughed aloud at Langly's calling him the 'Dude of Honor'. 

Charles had offered to walk down the aisle with her mother and Hannah as an attendant to the bride should, but there was only so far she was willing to stretch convention. Instead, Charles would simply join her and Mulder at the altar from his seat, along with Lindsay Matheson, who was serving as Mulder's Best Man. She knew that it was just this kind of break from tradition that had her older brother Bill seething, but mostly he was angry that she'd not even entertained the notion of him walking her down the aisle to 'give her away' for more than ten seconds before she'd firmly rebuffed him. In truth, that was more consideration than the idea deserved: she and Mulder were committing themselves to each other, and no one else was involved in that process. She would give herself, binding her life to her partner, as he was giving himself to her.

She came out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs of their new house in Alexandria, ignoring the Agent with the earpiece who reported her movement to their colleagues downstairs and outside. She was slightly exasperated with the amount of security that they had been talked into accepting for what she wanted to be a private event, but there was not much she could do beyond laying down certain ground rules and trying to be gracious in her acceptance. Skinner had been adamant about the security plan, and although she knew that he was acting out of real concern for her and for Hannah, she also suspected that he was reacting to all that had happened to him in the past few months. Even with the dampening device that the clones and the Gunmen had made for him clipped to his belt, she knew that Skinner would never be easy until he was rid of the nanites. For that, she could not blame him – the feeling of relief she had at the absence of her implant had not waned in the weeks since it had been removed. 

Besides, Skinner wasn't the only one who wanted the tight security on their family. The press conference with Senator Matheson and Director Freeh about her own kidnapping and Hannah's birth and long confinement away from them had provoked a staunch groundswell of support within the ranks of their coworkers. It was true that law enforcement officials tended to react negatively whenever one of their own was hurt or killed, but this went beyond that. The idea that she had been kidnapped, violated, and had her children kidnapped had been met with anger. Nor had the intimation that Emily's illness and subsequent death was somehow related to her kidnapping gone unnoticed. There had been a list of volunteers for their security detail, from a number of branches of federal law enforcement, before the press conference had finished airing. 

Likewise, where there had been plenty of Agents who had disparaged Mulder in the past, there was a new and unexpected sympathy, and not just for him as a bereaved father to the twin that had been found, only to be lost. The idea of Samantha Mulder, the sister who had been kidnapped and never returned, suddenly became real to many of their colleagues. That Mulder had had a sister who was kidnapped was unusual enough, but to have his partner kidnapped, and their children stolen from them and hidden by unknown conspirators? It was unthinkable. While both Mulder and Scully were officially on parental leave, they had been in the building on enough occasions in the past month that Hannah's charm had worked its usual magic, while the idea of her dead twin slowly but surely began to inflame their colleagues. Perhaps, the thinking went, there always had been something to the wild theories that Mulder had spouted.

It had been extremely strange to hear her history being re-written, but she was powerless to stop it. Where once their colleagues had been determined to disparage, now it seemed they were equally determined to praise. After all, Mulder had been one of the best profilers in the history of the Bureau, and Scully was no investigative slouch. The painstaking pathological work that she had done for many of her colleagues was suddenly remembered, and Scully found herself in the odd position of being thanked for having done her job, on cases that had sometimes been closed years before. On one of her solo trips to the Hoover, Scully had overheard Mulder's loudest detractor in the bullpen opining that the real reason Mulder hadn't pulled his weight on background checks was because he'd been desperately, actively searching for Hannah to keep her from her sister's fate. Furthermore, he believed that Mulder and Scully's reassignment had been designed to keep them from discovering the truth about Hannah, and that Diana Fowley had more than likely been in on it from the beginning. The whispering that had begun with Skinner's collapse in the lobby got ever louder, and speculation on what part Assistant Director Kersh had played in their colleagues' suffering became a frequent topic of discussion. Agent Spender, the rumors said, must have discovered something that had led to his ominous disappearance.

Mulder had had his own firsthand experience with the bullpen's newfound solidarity with them when he'd stopped in to file paperwork declaring their new insurance status as a family. He'd forgotten one form, and commandeered an empty desk to fill it out while Hannah had chatted with a few of the nearby Agents. With Mulder seemingly distracted, their colleagues had formed a loose protective phalanx around their child. When Mulder had heard a meaningful quiet come over the bullpen, he'd told Scully in a still amazed tone, he'd been astonished to note that there were agents covering all of the access points to the area, most of them with their hands on the butt of their guns. The hush heralded the arrival of Assistant Director Kersh, who came sweeping into the bullpen seemingly ignorant of the high level of animosity directed toward him by the rank and file. He came over to Mulder and Hannah with more than his usual false bonhomie, speaking loudly and extending a hand to Hannah, who immediately drew away from him and moved back toward her father. One of the larger bullpen Agents stepped between Hannah and the AD saying, "Miss Mulder's been told not to allow strangers to approach her," in a firm tone. 

Kersh's blustering remark that Hannah was certainly more safe here at the Hoover Building than she was in her own home was met with an ominous and chilly silence. It also did nothing to move the Agent blocking the way. Only when Hannah was situated in his arms, and after Mulder had asked, did Agent Bailey begrudgingly stand aside. Mulder was further surprised to find that he was flanked by several Agents, all of them radiating incredible levels of hostility toward Kersh. Hannah, probably reacting to the not-so-subtle posturing of the 'nice men at Mommy and Daddy's office', had said 'hello' to Kersh, and then hidden her face in Mulder's neck for the rest of the conversation. Hannah's reticence toward Kersh only served to fuel the rumors about his potential involvement. 

Shortly after that incident, Skinner had informed them that he'd been approached by a Senior Agent who wanted to know why there was no Task Force investigating the crimes against Mulder and Scully. The SA had insinuated that he'd heard that the lack of a Task Force could be laid at Kersh's feet, and he questioned whether Kersh should have a role in the investigation, considering his well-known antipathy to both the Agents involved. He also told Skinner that there was a rumor going around that Kersh was trying to cut the security force watching Mulder, Scully and Hannah, and warned him that if it proved true, that he was not alone in being prepared to expose it, and Kersh, to the tender mercies of the press. Skinner's mordant wit and professional mien defied the description of gleeful, but that had been the impression Scully had been left with as he detailed the sharp turn Kersh's fortune had taken. For his part, Kersh was doing all he could to counter his negative image with the brass, but it had been irrevocably tainted –first, by his inability to find Agent Spender or to account for the whereabouts of Agent Fowley, and now by the rumors questioning his possible involvement in the crimes perpetuated against them. Skinner knew very well that a man suspected of culpability in a case with such a magnitude of harm would never rise to a leadership position beyond the one he now occupied. For all intents and purposes, Assistant Director Alvin D. Kersh's career at the FBI was over. Scully had to agree with their AD about one point – even if it hadn't been their original intention, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. 

Their notoriety didn't just extend to the FBI. The sensational nature of the crimes against them had guaranteed that there was extensive media coverage of the press conference and many subsequent interview requests. Assistant Director Jana Cassidy had tried to get them to accede to a number of these, arguing that both she and Mulder, whom she characterized as photogenic, would be good for the FBI's recruitment efforts. Considering everything that they'd been through, and the reasons that they'd become notorious, Scully wasn't sure AD Cassidy's reasoning was sound, but kept her opinion to herself, promising only to discuss it with Mulder. In the end, she and Mulder had kept their exposure minimal, consenting only to an appearance on _America's Most Wanted_ with John Walsh, a man who understood the loss of a child and was more than happy to broadcast the faces and names of those they sought to bring to justice. 

They'd moved into their new house the day after the broadcast had aired and the Chief of Police for Alexandria had been one of their first visitors. He came to welcome them to the neighborhood and to assure them that the Alexandria PD would be paying particular attention to the Scully-Mulder household. As a housewarming gift, he'd brought a map enumerating all the law enforcement officials in their immediate vicinity, including contact numbers. They'd accepted his information graciously, although they were already aware of most of it – the numbers of law enforcement officers in the general vicinity had been one of the deciding factors in their buying a home in this particular neighborhood. 

The large scale publicity had also allowed them to get a waiver from the Archdiocese to hold their wedding at home, in a location more private than a church. Father McCue was waiting for them under the flower-bedecked tent that stretched from the back deck to the back fence in an attempt to keep the photographers at bay. One of the more unsettling outcomes of John Walsh's publicizing Hannah's kidnapping and recovery on _America's Most Wanted_ had been the fact that Mulder and Scully had become prime fodder for America's insatiable appetite for celebrated crime stories. In fact, their security team was mostly occupied with keeping tabloid reporters away from them. There were only so many concessions they were willing to make to keep Hannah safe, however, and loss of privacy on their wedding day wasn't one of them. 

She stood near the back door of their kitchen, looking out across their deck to where Mulder stood, at the end of the aisle directly opposite her, talking to one of the Agents on security detail. From the look of him, not to mention the hand gesturing, he was talking about sports. Her eyes skimmed over his lean form and surveyed the backyard with an assessing eye. The flowers really had come out well, if she did think so herself, and Mulder's idea for laying out the backyard to accommodate the wedding had turned out to be quite striking. When she'd rejected the idea of walking down the aisle to meet him while he'd waited for her, Mulder had drawn up his notion of a wedding floor plan, announcing "X marks the spot!" 

Father McCue stood in the center of the X awaiting them. Mulder and she would meet in the middle, and be joined by Lindsay and Charles coming in from either side of the X. They would marry, after receiving a brief blessing. Although Mulder had been very congenial about the whole Catholic aspect of the ceremony, he would not agree to the inclusion of a Mass, much to her mother's chagrin. Secretly, she was glad of his recalcitrance, because it had allowed her more latitude in the planning. She had wanted this day to be intimate and about them, and despite the number of Agents that were inside and outside the house to provide security, it was. It was a gloriously beautiful afternoon, with blue skies, white clouds and abundant sunshine. They had been provident in choosing this weekend, as it had turned out to be one of the rare spring weekends where the weather was warm and pleasant, with no hint of the oppressive DC summer to come. 

The number of guests was small, and slanted toward the Scully side of their soon-to-be merged family, not that Mulder seemed to mind. He had finally consented to invite his mother, but only after much debate. Mulder loved his mother, despite her many faults, and the fact that he was tremendously angry with her. Still the image of Mrs. Mulder sitting, dignified and subdued, next to Senator Matheson and his wife, was a sad one. Lindsay and her daughter were seated in the row behind them, and Scully was pleased to note that Lindsay and her daughter seemed to be engaged in a friendly conversation with John Byers, as Langly fidgeted next to them, uncomfortable in his suit. If anyone could understand heartbreak and loss, it was Lindsay Matheson, whom she'd liked the instant she met her. Perhaps she and John might hit it off – but that was for another day. Her thoughts drifted as she caught sight of Frohike prowling the tent, taking candids of the guests. She would have liked to have the Kurt with whom she'd spent the most time in Minnesota present for the wedding, but he'd demurred the invitation, and she'd understood. Skinner was conducting one last sweep of the Agents in the backyard before he went to take his seat. 

On her side of the tent, her brother Bill looked as miserable as her old friend Ellen looked happy. Charles caught her eye from across the distance and smiled. They spoke so rarely, and saw each other even less often, but the bond of understanding that existed between them was as strong as ever. Charlie knew what she had here, and she was more grateful for his quiet support than she could express. She smiled at him instead, radiating all of the happiness that she felt at seeing the jumble of family, friends and colleagues who'd been a part of their lives all together to celebrate this day with Mulder and her. 

Across the backyard, Mulder turned away from the conversation he'd been having and toward her. His heartfelt smile at seeing her clearly expressed his appreciation, but just in case she was in doubt of his sentiments, he pressed his hand over his heart and made a subtle motion like he might swoon at the sight of her. She shook her head at him, but unlike the old days, made no move to check her smile. The diamonds in the wedding ring that Mulder would soon give her sparkled in the filtered light as he gestured. He'd taken her ring off to have it cleaned, but other than that, had worn it on his little finger while it awaited the transfer to her hand. She pressed her finger against her left thumb, running it over the ring that she'd bought for him. The band was both white and yellow gold, forged together in an unbreaking circle. It reminded her of the two of them, with their differing temperaments. She'd seen it and immediately known that it was the one for Mulder, and he'd agreed. 

Behind her, the Agent murmured that 'all systems were go' and she rolled her eyes, but the smile never left her face. The strains of "The Wedding March" began and her mother turned to look at her one last time before she stepped across the deck and began her trip down the aisle. 

"Be happy, Dana," her mother said to her, kissing her cheek. 

Her smile grew even wider. "I am, Mom," she assured her. "I am."

Hannah was nervous after her grandmother left her to walk down the aisle, but Scully was calm, bending down to kiss her after they walked down the deck stairs together. "Are you all ready?" she asked Hannah. "All you have to do is walk down the aisle to Grandma, but if you want to throw some flower petals on your way, that would be very nice."

"OK," Hannah said solemnly, her eyes wide. "I can do it."

"I know you can, pumpkin," Scully said. "3, 2, 1 … off you go."

She stood at the end of her aisle and watched their daughter walking, intently focused on strewing her petals. When she got to the center of the X, she bypassed her grandmother in favor of walking toward her father, strewing petals in his path before she hurried back to her grandmother, swinging her empty basket. 

She could hear Mulder's soft laugh from clear across the tent, above the murmur of the crowd chuckling at Hannah. She looked away from their daughter to find him regarding her with a wry but apologetic smile on his face.

She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, "Why not?" and Mulder laughed again.

They stood there smiling at each other one minute longer, Mulder as beautiful as Hannah'd said he was in his dark green suit. As their gazes caught and held, she knew that he was thinking about the miracle of this moment, as was she. She took a deep breath in and savored it, and saw him doing the same. The small crowd stilled, while the music wound around them. 

Suddenly, Hannah's voice rose above it in a loud whisper. "Aren't we starting now?" 

Scully could hear her mother shushing Hannah as she fought the bubble of happiness that threatened to send her into gales of laughter. She could see Mulder's eyes twinkling with restrained mirth at her from across the tent. 

He nodded at her, and as one, they both took one step toward each other and then another, knowing that they would meet in the middle, forever. 

~*~

The End


End file.
